This feels like something that could be ameliorated by trustworthy curation, but The Wirecutter hasn't given good signal for years now, if it ever did, and I haven't seen anything else yet.
I fear Consumer Reports is having their lunch eaten by Wirecutter, and while they seem attached to a very dated organizational model & visual design aesthetic, CR is SO much more rigorous and honest an organization. I pay for a sub on principal.
Totally agreed. I actually have both and Wirecutter recommendations have been utterly useless for me. Their entire focus has become "buy buy buy", just look at their homepage with deals and articles.
Truly. I think since Wirecutter recommendations are free (at least for NYT subscribers), they make money with affiliate advertising and make more money by having readers who spend money.
So, their interest in getting me to spend more money is at odds with my interest in buying a quality product (or skipping it if they all suck!). At least Consumer Reports is a paid product who only gets paid by me.
Wirecutter is definitely hit and miss but I will say that their upgrade pick for towels (Riley Home) are phenomenal and have held up to everyday use for 3 years and counting:
It’s a little sad, though, that it’s now impressive for a towel to last 3 years. The ones my parents bought in 1986 are still in my rotation for everyday use and holding up better than the set I bought (not cheaply) in 2010, which are starting to look like they need replacement.
Too funny, was just talking about this with my parents. My mom has bathroom towels she bought in 1988 that are still used every day. They're a little faded, but they look great and feel great. I think they're from Ralph Lauren. Same with their bed sheets that show no signs of failure after decades of use. They've had the same comforter since I was 5 years old.
Meanwhile we've gone through Parachute, Brooklinen, some sheets and towels from Macy's, and nothing seems to last.
I don't know enough about the brands they sell, but thinking we might buy from here next: https://linensociety.com/
My main problem with CR is that when I'm looking for an appliance, it typically recommends a slew of models that simply are not available anywhere. They are all discontinued or out of stock, and they have not tested the models that are widely available.
Perhaps they are more worth it for cars, though that is not a frequent purchase.
CR is inexpensive enough to be worth it for a homeowner - there is always something breaking that needs replacing - but not as worthwhile as I would hope. I often wind up buying based on poor signals such as brand name and online ratings.
I feel arguments like this always ignore the fact that buying a toaster in 1950 was a major investment for a family, and if you want to spend $2000 on a high-end toaster in 2023, which is probably equivalent in inflation-adjusted price to the 1950s toaster, it will probably also be very nice.
For me, I think the prime comparison is the KitchenAid stand mixer. You can get a new one that's functionally identical to the classic models that have lasted forever... and it'll run you at least $350 even during a major sale.
Our few year old kitchen aid has been a nightmare of broken plastic internal parts. I will weep when my mother passes, but I will be taking her mixer and ditching mine.
Plastic gears have lower friction and don't require greasing. They aren't really bad on their own. The problem is you can't find replacement parts when they break.
You'll need digital calipers as well. You can cheap out for $20, or get Mitutoyo's for $200.
A scanner's also nice in scanning a geometry thats flat, but not required.
Just with a 3d printer and a meager ket, you can replace most current commercial crap in a few hours, and have the replacement as a file you can call on any time.
That's how I'm handling this "throw away culture" shit. I'm replicating what I need and throwing away the actual broken bits.
Reduce, Reuse, REPAIR, Recycle. (Hint: the manufacturers want you to forget the 4th, hidden R.)
Because they are all custom sizes. And they don't break often. It's like 10 years after purchase where there aren't too many other owners looking for parts and the original company doesn't support it anymore.
The irony of course is that they deliberately make some parts out of plastic so they break before the rest of the machine does when you're misstreating it.
I’ve had the same experience, with paper shredders - particularly the Fellowes brand, in the UK - which all have a nylon (possibly some other plastic) cog, somewhere to overheat, then break.
There's a single nylon gear. The rest are made of metal. They've been using a sacrificial worm gear since the 1960s.
KitchenAid switched to all-metal gears on their high-end models fairly recently. In the past, all models had a nylon gear, but the new high-end mixers use electronics to protect the motor.
TL;DR: The Pro Line is what you want. These have higher-wattage motors and are made with all-stainless steel. This is important if you mix heavy things like doughs or meats frequently, as these materials tend to stress and shear plastic more easily.
KitchenAid sells 4 or 5 different versions of their stand mixers with retail prices ranging from $350 - $1000+. There is a reason for the price difference.
My mom has a Kitchen Aid kettle. That shitty thing breaks all the time forcing my dad to replace some parts of the circuit. (And it's not the users' fault, it's a damn kettle, there's not much you can do wrong except maybe starting it empty which they don't do)
A toaster in 1951 was $21, which is about $250 today.
I would argue that a $250 toaster today is still not a "buy it for life" item, but it would certainly have a lot of bells and whistles and almost no user-serviceable parts.
Toasters are an interesting case study. I went on a tear last year after being fed up with every toaster doing the same bad job. I thought maybe someone made a proper toaster. What I found is that when you pay more the coat of paint gets nicer and maybe there's an MCU+LCD, but the guts and logic are identical. There is no good commercially available toaster today. It's sending a very loud message about how markets operate, and it's not pleasant.
Big part of the problem is the disappearance of brick and mortar stores, along with the constant bait and switch from e-rerailers making product reviews impossible.
That rave review was for an identical toaster with different guts, or with amazon reviews, something else entirely.
My biggest issue is with the lever. I have to push it down between 5 and 10 times before it will trigger, without fail. I've had this across most all toasters I've owned.
My second biggest issue is related to the same mechanism: the "pop" is impotent and does nothing to eject what's being toasted. The most I can hope for is that I can manually push the lever up.
The next biggest issue is with heating element distance. If there's anything that is wider than a slice of wonder bread it's going to get sizzled by the heating element. In the worst cases it causes smoke to be emitted for several runs afterwards.
They are probably all made with the same guts from one or two manufacturers. Same with microwaves, nearly every model from $100 to $5000 is made by Midea. (Source: Wirecutter)
My Sunbeam has a temp sensor. This toaster is at least twice my age, and it will likely outlive me. It's such a rare feature that I'm sure your parents and I have the same model (though likely a different year or style, as it varied by decade)
Modern retail toasters, don’t seem to be able to fit a proper standard English sized, slice of bread - the size of which, I’m not convinced has increased over time - but rather, the toasters have been designed primarily with US sized slices (which I’m under the possibly erroneous impression, are smaller?!), as the target market.
Yeah, I know - I actually mentioned it in another comment here.
Even with Dualit, I would still only purchase from a professional catering retailer. Just in case, there’s any differences, and the fact that purchasing from a professional catering retailer, implies a greater level of longevity, if it ever did breakdown - for potential small claims court, reasons, in the future.
Regardless, Dualit also pretty much make every part of their toasters replaceable, for this exact reason. Hence why I think it’s one of the only decent toasters, out there!
I think Dualit still make pretty straightforward mechanical ones. Or if not, you can buy an old one that's already been someone else's toaster for life and can now be yours.
I mentioned my Zojirushi toaster oven in another comment .. I use it as a toaster, and for a dozen other things. But it looks like they don't make the bread slice kind of toaster.
Dualit 2-slice toaster: £160. It's held together with ordinary screws, contains no transistors, the timer is mechanical, and all spare parts can be ordered. It costs nowhere near $2,000.
It's kinda just random luck I'd think. My toaster is about 15 years old now, just a generic Breville one. Still works fine.
I imagine anything that would break in a toaster is absolutely trivial to fix, but you are working with mains electricity so in most places you probably need a license to service it. Which just costs more than a brand new toaster.
We don’t even call them toasters anymore in my household. Our Cosori air fryer has a toast setting that works beautifully.
It cost less than $250. It warms, bakes, roasts, dehydrates, as well as 10 other settings. It has 3 different racks, so I can toast 3-4x as much bread than I could in a regular toaster.
I’ve only had it for 6 years, but it has held up nicely, no issues whatsoever. I guess what I am trying to say, is that the product is the bells and whistles these days.
> I would argue that a $250 toaster today is still not a "buy it for life" item, but it would certainly have a lot of bells and whistles and almost no user-serviceable parts.
Not if you buy one that is $250 because it has bells and whistles. You can buy a $250 dollar toaster that is just a toaster and it will be of good quality.
The problem isnt that long lasting, durable products no longer exist.
It's that they're no longer marketed for home use.
You can get stuff just as good as back in the '60s, for comparable after-inflation prices. But they don't sell them at Sears or HomeSense, they sell them at industrial or kitchen or office supply stores.
The thing is, if someone decided to stock that toaster on the shelf at Target, it wouldn't sell. Most people make so little toast that the words "duty cycle" or "slices per hour" are not even in their vocabulary. People are simply making purchasing decisions with a higher weight on other criteria.
Maybe, for the environment's sake, people should be buying and using appliances for 70 years. But do people actually want a kitchen full of appliances that are 35 years old on average? Probably not, thrift shops are still full of contemporarily made appliances that were discarded before their useful life ended.
I think that is some of what people miss. Way back when a cheap toaster at Sears was still expensive. Now you have hyper cheap toasters for like $15 bucks now, which would have been a dollar or so back then, you just couldn't get a toaster that price back then. So the cheapest item has drug the average quality down to it.
The reviews suggest this $250 toaster isn't any better:
"was hoping it lasted longer & would be better quality but was disappointed"
"All the coils do no not glow and It toasts unevenly"
"one side stops working after 6 months or so. I’ve gone through three of these"
"Bought two of these toasters both stopped working"
"Have to replace this toaster about once a year, one side will always stop working"
"Lasted me about a month or so and it no longer works".
"Died so quickly!"
I think this is a perfect example of the problem. There is a market for $250 toasters, but even for that price you can't buy a reliable toaster.
The site has other well reviewed toasters at similar prices, I picked that one because it was exactly the price being discussed.
Either way, the bathtub curve of product failure still applies no matter the price point.
Bear in mind that people on this site are using toasters at duty cycles hundreds to thousands of times higher than home users. 6 months of commercial use of one of these toasters could very easily be a lifetime of use for a single home.
my toaster is an enameled steel tray with a steel wire grille on top of it. you put it on a gas stove burner to heat up the enameled steel enough to radiantly toast the bread resting on the grille. it's tray-shaped to catch the crumbs so they don't end up on your stove; the grille flips up so you can clean the crumbs out before they burn. a handle, made out of the same steel wire as the grille, allows you to remove it from the burner without burning your hand, and folds in for compact storage when you're not using it
but i got mine out of the neighbor's garbage during our eight-month-long covid lockdown, gambling that it wasn't covered with cyanide or something
the electric kind you're probably talking about goes for about US$20–US$40 around here but i wanted to point out that there does exist a more reliable alternative
I just prefer buying things that will be durable and last a long time. All I can tell you about toasters these days is that none of those exist so I'm not interested in any of the ones that do.
You can buy commercial versions of most machines which will be much better quality and without the stupid touch-screen gimmicks. They might cost 10x as much but that's also how much more domestic ones used to cost back in the day.
Yeah the problem is legibility. It's easy to see a touchscreen, or to understand a WiFi connection. But it's harder to understand why you should rant an oversized motor that will only be run at half capacity.
Features that increase longevity or repairability are considerably less legible to most consumers and therefore get removed first when trying to cut costs.
The other day I was telling my wife that the next blender I'll get will be a "fuck you" blender.
That's the name I gave to an old blender I had 25 years ago when I lived on my own while studying. The blender was an Oster brand and only had an on/off switch. I sold it to a friend when I left that city.
Fast forward 25 years, my friend told me that his mom is still using the same blender. No programs, no memories, no modes. Just Off and "fuck you" mode haha.
Now I also want a toaster with similar properties. Just let me put my bread slices, click a button and give me my good sliced bread. That's all I need. And hopefully that simplicity makes the gizmo last 20+ years.
Blendtec or Vitamix are what you want. They have modes, but the motors are very very good and they stand by their products (8 and 10-year warranties, respectively)
A toaster in 1950 would probably be closer to $250. Also, I don't like this counterargument because it holds that we should expect to be no better at creating high quality appliances today than in 1950 despite 73 years of advances in engineering and technology.
A Kenmore toaster in 1951 was $21 new, or $253 now.
And if you go buy a commercial toaster it will (likely) last as long as one of those old toasters on average.
This said those old appliances could be fixed, but today the labor costs of having someone else do it would be astronomical for most people. A significant portion of the total cost.
What changed to bring down the cost so much? There's some clever bits to make them work, but the bill of materials is low, and none of the parts or manufacturing should be all that complex.
It probably won't. Chances are it'll be just a shiny "high end" model which is the same parts and materials as the cheap ones but with some additional functions nobody cares about. High prices are just a market segmentation strategy to CEOs.
I've grown so disillusioned with these "products" that I've started trying to make them myself instead of buying them. It's difficult though. Even something "simple" like a high quality knife requires a lot of skill to create. I want to create at least one before I die though.
I feel arguments that treat inflation as a magic singular variable around which the universe revolves ignore that decades of progress and technology and economies of scale are also factors, and they make possible in 2023 a hypothetical toaster that's both affordable and reliable.
Honestly if you could plonk down a ton of money for a reliable appliance that’d be great but that’s usually not what money buys you now. Spending more usually results in fancier styling, nicer materials if you’re lucky, and a bunch of unnecessary technological frippery that ends up making the thing less reliable, not more.
That’s the real problem is that the luxury tier of so many markets has thoroughly enshittified. I generally trust that Apple computers are Toyotas and a few other brands tend to last (or at least have robust enough support structures in place like with the former) enough that I feel more comfortable owning them but few others earn that trust from me.
I’ve heard good things about Miele vacuums, but apparently only the heavy duty canister vacs. Their more consumer friendly uprights are apparently mediocre. Other appliances I have no idea.
If you want appliances that last, buy the commercial ones. Hobart makes an under counter dishwasher that you can bet will never wear out and can be repaired.
Shell out for an industrial washing machine like they have at the laundromats. Those things are made to run all day for years. If they break down, they're repairable.
My Miele dishwasher has totally failed less than 5 years old. Not worth the expensive price. Probably fixable but requires a multi-hundred-$ relay. I haven't fixed it because of my time cost (such a hassle).
Previously bought a much cheaper dishwasher for my previous house that is still going strong. I found a geeky person on the sales floor that dealt with dishwasher returns and asked his advice for buying a reliable one: his advice seems to have been solid. I recommend trying this approach.
Unfortunately we can no longer trust brand names. Most previously trustworthy brands have turned to shit. I now mostly aim for mediocrity because that seems to be the sweet spot (cheap is usually trash, expensive usually is poor value for money).
It is very difficult to make good decisions for most purchases - requiring too much effort and brainspace. I never want to learn the details of appliances but I am given little choice.
The other problem is that the UX/UI of many modern devices has gone to complete shit. Searching for a usable appliance is a nightmare.
Having remodeled several kitchens, this has also been my experience.
If there were a brand that released exactly one of each appliance, over-built that one model, and invested the budget in robust components instead of wifi smart home touch screen bullshit, I would love to stop becoming an expert in all these product categories.
The industrial washing machine will last a long time and it is repairable if it breaks down. But the one guy on this coast who services and can get parts for it is pretty busy and if you can't offer him a long-term contract to maintain thirty of them you may find yourself fairly low on his priority list.
> Shell out for an industrial washing machine like they have at the laundromats. Those things are made to run all day for years. If they break down, they're repairable.
Industrial - or old school, Hoovermatic twin tub, where you can choose the exact length(s), of your wash/rinse - albeit, by babysitting it.
I’m curious which ways you mean. Many things that we assume existed in the past were pretty unevenly distributed. Even something basic we take for granted like plumbing was only available in only a ~third of households in some states https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-plumb...
Hand made in the UK, fully mechanical and you can get spare parts for it.
There's very little that can fail, it doesn't have a spring that brings the toast up, you need to push the lever yourself. Even the timer is fully mechanical.
I was thinking this. When we moved into our first house it took years before we had completely furnished it. My son did his first flat for less than one month's salary.
I try very, very hard to live by Morris's credo. It is not easy. Finding things which do their jobs well and hold up takes so much time and energy. And on top of that, I despise waste, so I'm usually not willing (even if I can afford it) to buy a dozen different models and throw away the losers. That's the best way to do it, if you can manage it.
But there are a few good things out there if you know where to look.
Tools, especially, have good options. But then I use a lot of those professionally and get to experiment using someone else's time and money.
It does take a long time to find quality items. I'm glad to mostly have all the items I want, at least those that already exist.
I don't care too much about some of the things the author talks about. A suitcase not able to stand up when full is annoying, but also well within my ability to fix. I guess I'm just conditioned to junk.
The one thing that pisses me off the most is how the swiffer (mop) handle isn't strong enough for mopping. We've broken over a dozen of them in the exact same spot. We have taken to repairing them ourselves with a plastic welder.
They already have a freaking subscription model built in with their stupid pads and incredibly overpriced fluids, at least the mop could be really well-built and a pleasure to use.
I somehow ran across this trivia twice today. It stings; Pyrex was a brand I still trusted.
The other thread mentioned that they license rights to use "pyrex" (vs "Pyrex") to pretty much anyone, but the capital-P brand should still be the OG company. Maybe that was relevant in your case.
At this point I don't trust it if it doesn't at least explictly claim to be made with borosilicates. There are such suspicious items for sale on Amazon and I trust them more than "pyrex."
I don't understand why anyone would do this even with real borosilicate glass. It is unreasonable to expect glass to survive with something massive and hot on one side and something massive and cold on the other side. Even flawless pyrex will break with temperature differentials above 300F.
So this article implies that a number of things that we buy previously were built to last longer, and indeed did last longer. The first few examples are kitchen appliances. In this case I don't really know, but I'm at least willing to listen. Ultimately the evidence is people responding to a thread on Twitter where he solicited complaints. Not so compelling.
But then he mentions a "hybrid sedan". Here I'm aware of the data. It's not close. Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past.
> Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past.
Forget "durability" - safety is paramount. Those old cars were tanks, simpler, last longer and easier to repair but absolute death traps and dump smog.
[Edit]
Guess they didn't last longer, either way I'm happy to leave behind the cars of yester-year... even the 90's a bit sketch (though WAYYYY better).
On average they didn't (oh no, that repair costs more than the "car is worth" as if that's a metric that actually means anything) but it was far easier to keep one running indefinitely. You could take an engine to a small machine shop and get the head and block resurfaced, valves reamed and cylinders lapped. Without any electronics to fail it was just a block of metal that was slowly losing material and a quick hit with a file could even out any imperfections leaving it like new, just with very slightly more displacement.
Modern engines are way more reliable because they have coatings and materials that will last nearly indefinitely in most parts of the engine but they're built on proprietary sensors and electronics that need a steady stream of replacements and secret software to debug.
We could make cars last indefinitely from a supply chain perspective, but commoditizing software and electronics would make them very marginally more expensive. We absolutely can't have that because, drum roll for the 1000th time, 99% of the population doesn't give a flying fuck and wants cheap shit at all costs.
As someone who drives an “old” Honda 2006, I’m surprised that this machine is still running very good. I could just take it to my local shop and had it fixed in 1-2 days. Based on my logs, I took the car for repair on average of 3-4 times a year.
I am looking to purchase a new family vehicle in the future but with all the softwares, screens, and fancy stuffs I am not sure if I liked it. Anyone feels this way?
I really wish there was a new car that I wanted to buy, because my 1998 Jeep isn't getting any younger. But holy crap is the modern car a dumpster fire of shit from a UI perspective. Although it looks like at least some manufacturers are starting to take note: https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-touchscreens-buttons-back
My car has physical buttons for climate control, volume, lights, etc but also a nice sized touch screen for CarPlay. I got the last year before VW took away the steering wheel buttons with capacitive replacements, though it sounds like they too are waking that back.
Yes that article sums up my feelings on the modern car. But my main concern are the repairs 5-10 years from now. It’s crazy to think that a car would be recalled by just some software glitch if that’s what I read is correct.
This isn't specifically about Honda quality, but I think it's a nice Honda anecdote.
My wife bought a used Accord before we got married. Eventually it died on the highway and we had it towed to the dealer. The engine needed to be replaced because of the failure of a part that had been recalled (when it was owned by the previous owner) had not been replaced. Since it was due to a recalled part, Honda replaced the engine for the price of the oil.
We bought Hondas for the next 20 years after that. We still own a 2012 Accord that my son is running into the ground. Our current car is a Volvo, lots of nice features, but I think our next will be a Honda.
The engine of my 2006 Honda hasn’t had any major issue besides from oil leaks, and busted air coolant pipes, etc., minor stuffs. I guess the most important stuff is that to have its yearly complete maintenance.
My Acura (up line Honda) was nice, but Honda has been really slow with the EV transition, so I left them for my next car even though I liked their quality. Hopefully they make the EV transition eventually.
My 2017 CRV started bricking itself, of course right at the 5 year warranty mark. something was wrong somewhere and the electronics & sensor system didn’t know where so it was designed to shut all the electronic systems off, like cruise control, emergency braking, road departure mitigation, etc. etc.. about 20 different sub-systems, each one got it’s own separate loud annoying beep in succession every time the car started.
We took it to the dealer many times, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong either. That didn’t stop them from trying, by replacing whatever part was their best guess and charging us for the new one plus labor. During our final visit to the dealer, only a few blocks away, the car broke down. It limped, smoking, to the dealer where they found the AC compressed had seized causing the timing belt to melt, which then took out the alternator and several other components. After a $5,000 repair and assurances the problem must be fixed, we took it home and had a nice month’s worth of driving, and then it started bricking again. We couldn’t sell it fast enough, what a nightmare.
To their partial credit, Honda later reimbursed half the repair cost, and the dealer admitted the vehicle failure was design flaws that were out of our control. We also found out after the repair that the AC compressor had been recalled, but unfortunately the new one didn’t fix the problem.
Tl;dr I did before I bought it, but I personally no longer believe Honda to be more reliable than any other brand. One major problem across the industry now is that they know how to make good reliable engines and powertrains, but none of them are any good at computer software reliability, and computers have very suddenly taken over all critical systems in the car.
There's a few tricks to know for each model. I got a mid 2000s ford with a by all accounts unbreakable engine (600hp possible on stock internals) but the radiator and trans cooler is the same unit and often cracks pushing coolant into the trans. First thing i did to it was to buy an aftermarket external trans cooler for my specific model and install it.
Repair 3-4 times a year or oil changes/consumables? How many miles does this honda have, age is not a good indicator over miles.
If you are really having this car repaired 4 times a year for 18 years (72 repairs) this doesn't sound like a reliable machine. A modern Toyota or Honda can go many years with 0 repairs, just consumables.
You can have that level of quality and care for the entire car, not just limited to the drivetrain and electronics, and it's probably even in a showroom right now waiting for buyers, just at your nearest Rolls Royce dealership.
That's only if they don't QC every single part, for every single car, coming from new suppliers.
Which RR would do to avoid the obvious problem, only after a supplier has been verified to be sending only the highest quality product, would they ease off.
The simplest thing is that the supplier charges double or triple the unit price such that they can accept half the parts failing inspection and getting sent back.
It's more than just QC. When you make 3M cars per year, you get a lot of data points about what fails, and you you feed that back into new designs. You also nail manufacturing tolerances. When you make 4,000 (and a lot of those won't see the same mileage as a Honda), there aren't as many opportunities to find these issues.
Or another way: you an QC a bolt to death, but that doesn't tell you if it's undersized for the design.
Yes it does when there are several stages of prototypes and engineering builds before the actual production vehicle is shipped to customers... and the hundreds of other mechanisms and systems that major automakers use nowadays. I mentioned QC because it's the first screening for arriving parts, not the only thing that occurs.
Do you not know how car manufacturing works?
Anyways you don't have to take the quality of RR parts on my word if you still think it's impossible, just go a showroom and inspect it yourself.
Design iteration is typically a long tail phenomenon - new issues keep coming up as the system (car) faces new scenarios.
Even a high-resource prototyping program can only go so far with scenarios like - wear and tear/part fatigue, adverse environmental conditions, local peculiarities (e.g. regulatory requirements for uncommon configurations), unintended but common maintenance mistakes etc.
For example, a Fiat car my family owned suffered a cascade drivetrain failure after about 9 years on the road. I don't think a prototyping program could have captured that ahead of time.
The fact that the showroom RR parts look fine only indicates that the parts are ok immediately after manufacturing; it does not promise they'll work fine after several years even if treated will.
> Design iteration is typically a long tail phenomenon - new issues keep coming up as the system (car) faces new scenarios.
Even a high-resource prototyping program can only go so far with scenarios like - wear and tear/part fatigue, adverse environmental conditions, local peculiarities (e.g. regulatory requirements for uncommon configurations), unintended but common maintenance mistakes etc.
Which is why automakers typically recommends a maintenance schedule that catches the vast majority of potential failures before they occur on the road.
How does this, or anecdotes of your family's Fiat, relate to engineering and verification practices of parts coming in from suppliers?
It’s the old fuel injection vs carburetor debate. Do you want something that usually runs for 200k miles without a single problem, but takes a fancy shop to fix? Or do you want something that needs a complete rebuild every three months and needs to be retuned for your ski trip, but can be repaired by a high school boy with a tongue depressor, a q-tip, and a hammer?
The rapid exodus of carburetors shocked and dismayed many right-to-repair folks, but I think we now see with laptops and cell phones that all else equal, consumer preference strongly favors trading repair headaches for the otherwise more compelling product (thinner, faster, lighter, more powerful, etc)
I think you can have it both ways honestly. A TBI setup with a wasted spark ignition is at least as easy to work on a carburetor, with little or no extra complexity and way less headaches, while removing a lot of the problems older stuff had (no points, condensers and caps going bad, no need to mess with the jets, etc.). You can have it both ways, the manufacturers and consumers just have to give a shit.
One thing I suspect has tipped the scales in favour of less repairable products is the massive decline in social capital.
30-40 years ago, if your lawnmower broke down you'd ask Dave from two doors down to come and have a look at it.
Now, you'd either take it to a professional repairman (and get it back 2 weeks and $100+ later), try to work it out yourself via online tutorials, or just throw it in the bin.
Either way, it's far more painful for a product to bee temporarily out of service these days than it once was.
There’s clearly some of the baumol effect at play. The small engine repairman hasn’t gotten much more productive, which is part of why it’s so expensive to hire out repair.
IMO the reason we need better right-to-repair laws is because it's pretty hard to think about repairability at buy-time instead of at "when-it-fails"-time. Even more since companies that used to be good in the repairability front aren't necessarily still.
My backup commuter vehicle is a inexpensive (but modified) off-highway motorcycle for exactly this reason.
Sure, you have to have a small 'bug-out bag' (in this case a belt pack) with spare parts (bolts, belts, master links etc.) and some critical sockets if you want to take a ride without fear, but beyond that the thing is a tank. Even the most critical of problems can be fixed for minimal expenditure at Harbor Freight and/or a local motorcycle parts shop.
Aside from being fun, and confusing people every time they see it in the parking lot next to the Tesla/Rivian/Mercedes AMG crew, it is serious peace of mind that I've always got motorized transport that won't fail me.
Depends what era of cars we're talking. There's a ton of stuff from the 90s and 2000s like GM trucks, that I strongly suspect will be on the road longer and in greater numbers than stuff 10 years newer. The mid to late 90s and early 2000's seems to be the sweet spot where fuel injection and simple electronic ignition, and stuff using older designs (engine's, etc.) that had to be built heavier, combined with better metallurgy, better oils, better gas, and so on, meant that the vehicles, when taken care reasonably, would go well past a quarter million miles. There's a ton of stuff now, that given much weird crap is on there and how much stuff is done to squeeze every last MPG out (like a lot of GDI setups, auto start/stop, transmissions that pull into neutral automatically at a stop, etc.) that I really doubt will make it as far. Even as far as repairability, a 90's 4L60E or 4L80 can be repaired way, way more easier by way more people, in an economic fashion than a lot of later transmissions (that you may as well just throw away). I'm sure this holds across other brands too; Volvos come to mind, as the older rear wheel drive red block cars were certainly far better built, more reliability, and had an unbelievably better lifespan than the absolute garbage Volvo has put out after Ford bought them.
Well, they do (present tense) last longer in the sense that they’re still around and working, which of course doesn’t mean newer cars are worse. It’s a bit like saying someone who’s 70 lives longer than someone who’s 7.
I think newer cars seem to be more reliable but older cars probably lasted longer than you think, it’s just that your view is skewed due to the market you’re used to (reading your link, while a million miles is a lot, though not unheard of for a taxi, the mention of 17 years as if that’s and old car is something I find surprising.
It’s common where I live to see cars from the 60s or 70s still being driven. And I don’t mean maintained classics (though those exist too), I mean just old rusty cars that still work.
All this to say that while you’re most likely right about newer cars being more reliable (and they’re certainly safer, which is more important), that doesn’t mean older cars stopped working after 20 or 30 years, it just seems your view is skewed because you live in a place where a 17yo car is considered old.
I didn’t mean to say all old cars lasted longer but I can see that it came out that way. I just wanted to point out that some are still around, and further, the US is probably not the best market for a study on car lifetime since it seems most people change their cars when they’re still far from being EOL.
An AMC Gremlin came out in the 1970s, and you don't see almost any at all because they were complete crap.
Especially the 70s US cars and somewhat later were complete shit and lead to the meteoric rise of Japanese cars in the US. Almost nothing US built those days got close to 100k miles without massive amounts of rebuilding.
The Gremlin is probably too extreme an example (and as someone not from the US, I’m only aware of it because it became the
Butt of jokes in US TV and movies), but I still agree with your larger point.
In my country the closest example for those years would be the Alfa Romeo, which led to a popular saying here in the 80s that an Alfa made you happy twice: when you bought it, and when you sold it!
>It’s a bit like saying someone who’s 70 lives longer than someone who’s 7.
It's more like saying that someone who's 7 && depends on factory-only parts, processors, and software, that wont be available in 20 years, with ever more complex designs being pushed in between, will not make it to 70.
Totally irrelevant links — the assertion was about hybrid cars, those links speak to cars overall.
The Toyota Prius debuted in the US in 2000. I’d argue 23 years is simply not sufficient to make an argument about long term reliability—particularly given that sales took a while to ramp, and any issues in, say, the first 10 years are likely to be dismissed as teething problems.
The article was about consumer goods in general, so data about cars overall is more relevant than a single brand. Nonetheless, the Toyota Prius is, by reputation, a very reliable car. Here a used car website used it's data to estimate car model's lifespan, finding that a Toyota Prius has a potential lifespan of 250000 miles, much greater than anything from the 1980s.
Not to get too deep into this, in the 80s cars were crap. That is based only on my own personal experience. But I have no idea how reliable cars made 70 years ago were (like the kitchen appliance mentioned in the article). I've seen really old cars still on the road, but those are probably owned by collectors / people that take effort to preserve those types of cars.
Cars made in the 40s and 50s were very unreliable, required significantly more maintenance than modern cars. You had to service things like breaker points, batteries and carburetors every few thousand miles. Most modern cars can go 10,000 miles between checkups and major components can go 100k+ miles with no work needed.
In the UK, the Prius seems to be used very widely by taxi companies. In fact most of the Prius's I see are in taxi company livery. To get the best out of a Prius (or, I guess, any hybrid) you should drive it non-aggressively, avoiding steep accelleration and braking. That may have something to do with the longevity of the Prius.
I've owned two Toyotas, neither ever broke down, and one of them saved my life (in a crash). If I were in the market for a car, I'd get a Toyota.
> Toyota Prius > argument about long term reliability
But you can tell a bit about their long term reliability by looking at heavy users like Taxis and Ubers.
The Prius is used because it is cheap, cheap to run, and cheap to maintain -- even by outlier users like Uber drivers (also note drivers are usually buying consumer versions).
Arguing about 23 years is a strawman - which would mean you could never buy anything new because new models haven't yet had even a few years of usage prediction.
That's the smartest possible counterpoint to all this, nicely counterpointed.
This was a fun read and I agree in sentiment to the rage of all the crap from target that falls apart in 10 minutes but I feel like I've developed an ok sense if when I'm taking this risk and am less frustrated when something cheap fails. Essentially any time I buy anything but a book from Amazon or anything but cereal and vodka from Target. Ultimately I think the crapification of lowend consumer goods has just made me buy less crap, which feels good I think. I've also accepted a pretend scifi narrative in which the only kind of society that doesn't descend into anarchy is one where people are constantly buying and throwing away cheap crap.
And as an aside I have one of those crazy juicers but I stopped using it because it scares my wife and smells like burning / ozone.
I used a Kindle 2 e-reader daily for ~14 years and, aside from decreased battery life, it was still great. Sadly I eventually stepped on it one too many times and the screen cracked.
I might fix it for ~$20 with ebay parts if I ever get bored enough.
Yeah this article would be a lot more interesting if there were a conspiracy to buy up all of the indestructible appliances made more than x decades ago.
If they really were that much better then more of them would be around today.
I don't like this trend either. I was trying to buy an electric toothbrush the other month and there were so many models with different features. I'm like wtf it's a toothbrush, can it brush my teeth? Yes? Give me that one. I don't need you to tell me when to replace the brush or how long to brush for or sing me a song.
I live in Sweden and can find quite a lot of old school kitchen appliances in flea markets/thrift stores. I bought my Technivorm Moccamaster coffeemaker in one, a Bamix immersion blender, a Bosch stand mixer, all of them from around the 80s and still working 100% fine.
My 3 year old Moccamaster’s auto-off feature gave up a couple months ago. It uses a special mechanical switch—an illuminated rocker switch that physically flips and turns the carafe warming plate off after 100 minutes—that I know I could easily replace if I had the part but Technivorm insists I send the unit to them which I probably never will do because the packing and shipping is a pain and costly and because I need my coffee.
That old juicer from the 40s was likely expensive "industrial" equipment for restaurants. Even today, if you buy any professional appliance and only give it occasional home use it will last forever.
I enjoyed the rant nature of the essay but your comment hits the spot.
We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed, and ignore the overconstruction required of the survivors because mechanical theory was still developing at the time.
Also we used to have more single-application devices; while a juicer is often still a single-application device today, at the other extreme our phone has absorbed a deskfull of other single-application devices (and more). Usually with some improved reliability, some less, and also some loss of affordance.
>We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed,
Engineers tend to put care into building bridges that don't collapse, and have been doing so for millenia so collapses can happen, but are rare. "All the bridges that long ago collapsed" is in my opinion not all that many bridges, really [1], and lots of people remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. I still remember the bridge collapse from the Northridge quake too.
Bridges are a special case of civic architecture where long durability and long reliability are taken into account that are kind of a special class, so they're probably not a great thing to generalize from.
Well I was talking about the Victorian era (emergence of iron bridge building) and indeed quite a few make that list. "Engineering" in the sense it has today didn't exist back then. Brunel was truly revolutionary in this regard, though even how he thought of it would be far from what we today call engineering.
We see this in the evolution of many technologies, from boiler explosions (especially in trains) that are pretty much unknown today to jet air travel (likewise at a rather extraordinary state of safety) and many others besides (consider the implementation and impact of vaccination).
The bridges we still have are maintained. Bridges fail all the time, but we only repair the ones we want to keep. Your link to wikipedia as proof that bridges do not fail is a case of the observer fallacy. The wikipedia article tells us of some bridges that failed, not all bridges that failed.
Gumby's point that the Victorian era bridges we still have were over-engineered is I think a good point. However we might like to say that they were well-engineered, but I bet that even they have been in a state of on-and-off if not constant repair.
Thinking back to growing up, we had an electric stove, washer, dryer, dishwasher, and refrigerator. All were purchased from '79-82 or so.
1. Stove died in about 2007
2. Washer/dryer were replaced with something "better", although they were still running in 2009
3. Dishwasher died in 2011
4. Refrigerator was replaced but still running in 2013
This was not just survivorship bias. Basically all of these appliances lasted at least 30 years. They were from good brands (Washer/dryer and dishwasher were Maytag), but I don't think you can buy an appliance today that you can truly expect to last 30 years. At the least, there will be some sort of control board that will give out after 10-15 years and won't be available anymore.
This. I don't really care about cars but for household appliances there is a clear tendency towards obsolescence.
Another data point: Just replaced a washer from the early 90s (German low-price brand, "Privileg") with one from the 2010s by a higher-priced brand (Bosch). Both were used. Reason for replacement: small top-loader for larger standard washer.
Both were obviously bought used.
The newer one broke within six months. The old, 30-year old one still works. The defect was a mechanical one, not the PCB. But notably, the still-functioning washer has no digital controls.
I know, anecdata is no data.
But for this kind of appliance, I'd bet my arm that their lifetime has decreased substantially.
Bought a house in 1990 that had all of the original appliances in it from 1974. The stove died around 2000 (26 years). The Fridge died around 2010 (36 years). The dishwasher died in 2012 (38 years).
We started renting that house out in 2010 and bought a different house that had appliances that were about 7 years old (based on what the previous owner had told us). We had to replace the dishwasher in 2012 (so it was 9 years old then) and since then we had to replace it again in 2022 (at 10 years). Had to replace the fridge in 2014 (11 years).
I bought a new Maytag washer/dryer when I moved. We were so frustrated by it that we decided we would replace them and then give them away. Had friends who were interested but, they couldn't get them to work at all either. They were literally junk straight from the factory. We had them serviced under warranty as well, just a huge waste of time and money.
This has to be a race to the bottom and yeah, technically somehow it did sort of wash our clothes, but it was a huge hassle.
Which was contemporaneous with the Yugo, so the Yugo is also a reliable and durable car? Or is it possible that there have been better and worse cars since the dawn of auto manufacturing?
Well, the explanation that people are getting exactly the dirt-cheap shoddy crap they demand is correct.
You can buy a nice burr grinder from a company that not only sells spare parts for at least 5 years after they stop selling the model, but who also shares youtube videos on how to disassemble and repair the grinder. Mine is 11.5 years old and I replaced the central gear when it stripped around year 7 or 8, after grinding 2-3 coffees a day, probably 150+ kg of coffee, for that time. However, it wasn't cheap, and people appear not to care. Baratza, btw.
I mean for myself buying a cheap burr grinder is probably all I'd ever need, that said I've never chased quality coffee and don't care about it much.
For myself I do the 'harbor freight' tool buying method. I buy a cheap whatever first, and if it's something I find useful and demand higher quality then I more research into what quality is with at least some experience.
This said, I've also had a lot of cheap tools that have effectively lasted far longer than expected so crap doesn't always fail fast.
Lidl/Parkside here in Europe seems to be the perfect example. Never been disapointed by one of their cheap products. They're always performing and seems built to last. My little Parkside vacuum cleaner is still doing strong 10 years after I bought it while my 5yo expensive as hell Dyson operates intermittently now and is just screaming for a new battery every time I launch it. More expensive products are also prone to software tricks and planned obsolescence... and unfortunately sometimes just plain crap that capitalize on their good reputation from the past.
Well… It depends. Lidl launched a range of good quality cordless tools under the Parkside Performance moniker last year. The 20V screwdriver and drill seem like solid pieces of work, and are holding up well in my tiny shop. Those are good, and I recommend these to anyone.
But many of the plain Parkside branded tools are utter crap. The oscillating sander with exchangeable triangular, rectangular, and circular attachments I got was made of way to little material to be useful. The plastic struts for the attachments (the process of swapping those being horribly inefficient) partly melted with use.
The Parkside drill press I have isn't too bad, but I had to fix a mechanical failure where the part which connects the manual up-down thingy to its gear just sheared off because it was a tiny rolled piece of metal sheet instead of a solid piece of 4mm diameter steel. I fixed that (replacing that bit with part of a bolt tapped into the axle) and it is doing fine now, but still.
I think your survivors bias thing is very true. I've used old things which would survive nuclear blast, and still have some. And, old things which were gimcrack rubbish and unusable.
Some old plastics de-polymerised badly in heat. A lot of old chrome and tin plating corrodes. Bone handled cutlery is not designed for dishwashers. Sure, the mix master is going strong but it was gold plated when my mother in law got it. Same with the cast aluminium mincer.
That said, I fixed a 24 year old magimix by replacing the motor starter, everything else is fine except its on its second polycarbonate bowl since dishwashers: now only washed by hand.
My Stihl shopvac finally crapped out. Not sure how old as it came with the house. I went to the Stihl shop to see if they had replacements and they asked me what museum I pulled it from. No replacement motor but still replacement filters so now it's a prefilter for my new Stihl shopvac.
Tried Stihl direct? In any case, a second life as a preclean isn't such a bad end. Or, you could use it to clean the filters on the new one and prolong its life.
>So this article implies that a number of things that we buy previously were built to last longer, and indeed did last longer
Anecdotally, I've lost count of modern kitchen appliances such as blenders, coffee makers, cooking "processors", that have died on me. And not cheap either, basically mid-tier stuff. Any such device with extra digital "smarts" and a monitor in particular is a huge red flag.
Whereas I still have some inherited such electric appliances from the 70s and 80s that still go strong (and whenever they did, they're totally fixable).
I do this for my home, many of the standard, non mechanical items are the same price as one at a big box store but the quality is immensely better. We had a sandwich prep fridge at the house for a number of years and I loved it. But it was much louder and added about $30/month to the electric bill.
Of course, cars and engines in particular are more durable today. This is due to technological progress. Cars weren't designed to be unreliable back then, they were unreliable because they couldn't do any better. Two or three years ago, I bought a pair of headphones for 200 euros that looked pretty high quality. They're now so broken that I have to hold them together with gaffer tape. Soon they'll be rotting (or not rotting) in some landfill. It's common knowledge that everyday objects are now deliberately produced in such a way that they don't last long. That's not a conspiracy theory.
I've got a pair of sennheiser headphones from 2011. Work just amazing, despite a decade+ of abuse. Only downside is the pleather on the ear caps wore off, but it's super minor.
I bought another pair back in I want to say 2019, and it's been just OK. The inline mute broke, but everything else about them seems just as quality (no pleather ear caps tho - just fabric which I think is an improvement).
In between those purchases, I've bought a handful of other headsets, all around 50-120$. They were universally crap. Either shit cables, shit comfort, or just wore out really fast.
Anyway, long story short - you can get some lasting quality products. It's super hard to tell when a brand has sold out to the capitalism devil though.
> Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past.
I continue to buy older cars because this has been false for me everywhere I've experienced new cars (borrowed, friends, my own).
Pointing out lack of data to support an argument that relies on anecdotal evidence is good practice. However:
- The anecdotal evidence is strong amongst older people
- Data not existing doesn't mean it _can't_ exist
I suspect that younger people are just used to things not working, so they don't complain. Then there's the fact that there is no incentive for anyone else to show things could be better (except the old codgers like myself, but we're not a profitable demographic).
I scour online auctions for old gear, because I know it'll work. Hi-Fi systems built in the 90s for example, were the panicle of hi-fi. Heck, I even have a CRT from _thirty years ago_ that still works like new (now think of your smart T.V. in thirty years).
Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?
That, is an excellent point. However, the very reason I buy in them in the first place is that they proved themselves to me _at the time_. Believe it or not, what I'm saying is I never had a bad experience with cars from the 90s, in the 90s.
The prices for 80s-90s 4wds like the Toyota LandCruiser and Nissan Patrols are climbing like crazy... Nissan even still make the 1990 model Patrol (GQ/Y60 frame) for the UN and Saudi Arabia.
I live in a place with real winters and road salt and I can assure you that modern cars are plenty corroded by 5 year mark if they weren't treated additionally post manufacturing for it.
I fitted a RasPi with mpd and a USB sound stick into a tube radio from 1958 that happily plays in our kitchen day by day, can stream live or NAS (important feature having children) and I just love the tube sound.
For the cars, I think it depends, possibly even on your luck. My car is old enough to vote, and aside from one simple repair I could do in 15 minutes in my parents' garage with a part that was sold by the dealership for 60 €, it only ever needed changes of consumables. Hell, even the scheduled maintenance at the stealership costs a song, cheaper than my motorcycle.
My dad's cars from the same era didn't fare so well and all required heavier repairs; none still work.
Also, since we're talking anecdotes, my parents have thrown out all their CRT TVs and monitors because they've all failed in some way (I've personally never had any). And I'm typing this on a Dell LCD monitor from 2015 or so that still kicks ass and has great picture, even by today's standards. My 2013 MBP still has a working, good-looking screen, and it's been on the road a lot.
> Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?
Yup, almost everything [0] still works like new, even my 2013 MBP which I've carted around a lot. It's not powerful enough anymore, so I have a new daily driver, but it still works. Hell, my gaming PC was bought circa 2013, and only had a new GPU 3 years ago (was bought for server work initially, so only had the cheapest GPU I could find). Still rocking the original SSDs, PSU, everything. Ditto for my wireless headphones I bought around 2018. The battery life is still good, the sound hasn't changed.
I've mostly lived in rental apartments, so I don't have any anecdotes about household appliances.
So not really sure what can be concluded from our anecdotes.
---
[0] The only thing that broke was an MS Sculpt keyboard, which broke down after 4 years of daily use.
> Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?
My flatscreen TV and the sound bar that came with it. My daily-driver computer. My Samsung Galaxy S3 which I still use daily for some tasks, works fine. My washing machine. My Kenwood stand mixer.
All around 10 years, all working fine still without repairs.
That's just the things I could think of on the spot. There's very few things I've had to replace that were broken. Most things I've replaced because I wanted newer features, and have sold or given away the old item.
I'll concede that my previous lawn mower falls in your category. It had a plastic bushing on the main shaft, which got torn up over time, and destroyed some other parts when it held a retirement party.
I think there is some truth and reasoning to your point and there is a missed point also: peoples’ desire/ability to repair broken modern appliances.
An example of this is my mother’s cooker. She has had it for 15 years now and it is still going strong/only cost £300 when bought new.
The main reason for this is the simple fact I’ve gone and repaired it when something on other failed. One repair was a power box — cost me £15 and 30 minutes.
Two other repairs were heating filaments (one for the main oven, one for a job). If I remember correctly the total cost of the filaments was roughly £75.
This is one example but I can think of many others where I have repaired appliances for friends and family when their initial reaction was “it’s broke, nothing lasts now, I need to buy a new X”.
My $20 Mr. Coffee my dad got me before I went to uni is about 9 years old, went through daily use for about 5 of those, stored outside for 2 years, has no problems.
I think people buy cheap weird shit and are surprised when it breaks but if you buy simple cheap shit it tends to work until you physically break it - I expect my enameled lime hand-squeezer to last basically forever also since I don't dishwasher it.
Speaking of kitchen appliances, we need a new immersion blender and my wife wants a cordless one. The old corded one lasted nearly 20 years, but most cordless ones have non-replaceable batteries and so are going to become junk long before the mechanical parts wear out.
I was just talking to my wife the other day about smaller items that are not being built to last. You can clearly see in products these days the built in capitalism. We’ve reached a point where I wonder how much more they can milk it. Making things smaller, reducing quality of parts, reducing thickness or length of parts and so on… that day we had experienced:
A board game where the plastic has been made thinner and thinner over years until the game really doesn’t function now.
A game where you drop a marble in a cylinder on top of plastic rods that slot in sideways and the game is to remove the rods and whoever drops the marble loses… well these rods were so flimsy they didn’t hold the marble up.
Survivorship bias. People look at old things today and say stuff biult long ago lasted longer. But that is only because all the junk from then isnt around anymore. What we have now is only the most durable stuff. Want to see what stuff was like in the past? Try working with knives made without stainless steel, when not cleaning your kitchen knife immediately meant a rust blade the next day. All those classic cars still around today? We forget all the horrible junk cars that nobody ever bothered to preserve.
> Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past
May I know the timeframe and your experience on which you base the conclusion?
Been driving for last 35 years. Every newer car is crappier in every possible way - comfort, speed, durability, quality, reliability.
It's not some subjective observations - some 40-50 years ago automakers were accomodating customers, now they accommodate numerous limitations imposed by governments to make it "safer". And I am not even touching engine limitations thanks to which we have weak motors which roar like boeing at 5k rpm but still doesn't help to move car forward.
Cars made in 70-80s easily work for 40 years, if managed properly and made by nissan, mercedes-benz, toyota and sorts. Good luck modern garbage to live slightly longer than warranty without majour issues.
> limitations imposed by governments to make it "safer".
You have scare quotes there for some reason, but by pretty much all accounts cars now are so much safer than before. Like to an insane amount, over a 50% reduction in chance of fatality since the 70s/80s.
> we have weak motors which roar like boeing at 5k rpm but still doesn't help to move car forward.
And again it's working. Efficiency has increased even more than safety, with new cars getting over double the fuel economy even accounting for the larger cars!
I find it very wrong to attribute safety to a car rather than a driver. Sure, makers did good marketing selling general populace this notion.
Safety cones from driver knowledge how to avoid dangerous situations and hedge risks. “Safety” comes from useless bells and whistles, which give impression of “intelligent” system.
Bot sure what you mean under efficiency - at my books efficiency is how fast i can get from point A to B with minimal expense. Low engine volume cars lose it at every point
Exactly. There is no fuel economy since you still have to pump it to 5-6k rpm and no safety as well since it may cost you life when you have not enough power during overtake.
Sport mode on some cars is so lousy implemented (some SEA market toyota for example) that it's not even a solution.
My first car was from 2004 and I've been envy of many features, especially "security" ones of modern cars like cornering lights or QoL stuff like reversing camera that I had to mount as customization.
The F150 I grew up with only lasted to 130k miles. To make that feat, it needed an engine rebuild, transmission replacement, air conditioner repair, alignments, power steering repair, numerous other minor repairs. The dash had cracks from the sunlight. The paint faded without clear coat. The fuel gauge didn't work. The windshield leaked.
Our modem vehicles are virtually new by comparison with only oil changes and replacement of wear items. The leather seats have some wrinkles and the floor carpeting looks worn.
I used my parents 30 year wedding present Maytag as a washing machine. It never really broke I just finally got a new one. I'm sure it was used from 1960 until about 1995.
While I generally agree with you, that data isn’t very conclusive.
JD powers also need to be read carefully to not put all problems in the same basket. Malfunctioning engine vs “Bluetooth pairing was laggy with my 8 year old android phone” can be counted in same basket if you don’t look carefully.
This brings us to the next thing which is that both expectation and complexity on todays cars are thousand times higher than 20 years ago, both from customers and emission agencies. Given that, it’s amazing how well they still work. Often better than older models.
This puts cars in its own exceptional category that is much more difficult to compare. Where’s a freakin juicer, a ballpoint pen or a pair of gloves has no additional expectations today compared to 1940. They just got worse.
Top Gear had a few episodes with old vs new comparisons. Needless to say the not-so-old classics were destroyed by average modern cars quite often [1].
Wow, a cited source about modern vehicles being much more reliable, let's check it out!
- I click the link; it's a press release from JD Power which I thought is pretty well known to be a corrupted institution that more or less just sells off awards to whichever manufacturers want to pay the most for them. Oh well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt and read the actual study which surely has data to back their assumptions.
- The study isn't actually linked anywhere for me to review
- There's a link to " learn more" about the study. I click it, and it's another press release about the study. It has a download button at the top, surely this must be for downloading the study. I click it, and it's a 1 page PDF of the press release with no actual details.
- At this point I can click a link to go back to the original press release but nothing to actually read the dang study.
All checks out I guess, modern cars are more reliable!
Even if I did actually find the full "study" I can absolutely guess that it's entirely based on trash data like random surveys of consumers and would be near worthless without having a single real data point around how often cars/parts break down.
At least as far as coffee grinders go, find a reputable company that will repair them. My Baratza Encore stopped working after about a year or two of operation, and I sent it in for repairs. It was probably just a small short somewhere, but I'm not an electrician. They sent it back to me after a week or so, cleaned inside and out and working better than new. I keep saying I'm going to replace it with the one from Fellow (the Ode), but for the past 4-5 years I've been finding other things to spend money on and the Encore just keeps going.
Right, in this specific case the problem is that "burr coffee grinder" became widely known as an indicator of quality, which meant that cheap products proliferated to take advantage of the prestige. The high-quality products that earned that reputation still exist, you just have to find (and pay for) them.
I was also surprised that he brought up Burr grinders, I don’t think I’ve ever had even a cheap one die on me? I doubt they’ll last 80+ years but the quality seems fine.
Hand grinders are getting better and better too, so if longevity is a concern you’re in luck.
I bought four seemingly identical, cheap Cuisinart burr grinders over a period of 5 years or so. One of them happily endured heavy daily usage for several years at a workplace until it 'disappeared' during a move; I found out years later that the person who took it still had it (no hard feelings! someone told them it was company-owned and being discarded) and it was still working great. Another (a gift) was still working a decade later, last I checked. The next two I bought failed within months. Apparently they made some minor tweaks to the build that completely ruined the durability. I'm sure they sold thousands of those junk heaps on the reputation they previously built.
Baratza publishes service and diagnostic manuals too - if you’re handy enough you can disassemble your grinder, locate the faulty component, and order a replacement from them. I replaced our grinder’s faulty motor (died after 8 years or so) and the grinder is still going strong 5 years later.
Baratza also sell replacement parts for their grinders on their web site, and provide clear instructions on how to install them. I am delighted to support a manufacturer that builds repairable products.
My friend has a Fellow grinder and I honestly can't stand it. It takes about 5 or 6 iterations to get all the grounds out. It looks sleeker, and would match all the other Fellow stuff I have, but is too frustrating to use, even if it were free.
As to your Encore, if you feel like a cheap upgrade you could replace your cone burr with the M2 from the slightly more expensive Virtuoso model. It's a drop-in replacement, however, you will have to take your grinder apart.
Author neglects selection bias: antiques that stopped working after 1 or 5 or 10 years have been in landfills for a long time.
My grandfather (1922-2006) opined: "Some folks say things aren't made like they used to be. But I remember those junky old cars that would break down every 50 or 100 miles. I remember that unreliable crap. I'd far rather have a modern car, even if I can't fix it." (He was more of a carpenter than an auto mechanic, built much of his own house)
The concept of a regular “tune-up” has likewise fallen out. Older cars needed carbs adjusted seasonally, spark plugs replaced, caps and rotors, timing, etc. tires are genuinely incredible. A car over 100k miles used to be at the end of its life, now cheap cars routinely go double that.
Those are all things that are still in cars (or have been replaced with digital equivalents) but have become so reliable that we need to be reminded to check them. It’s not unreasonable to expect spark plugs to last 100k miles.
Back in Ye Olden Car Days, making it to 100,000 miles was a mark of competent ownership & maintenance, as applied to fundamentally sound engineering. Chevy small blocks could make it. Novas, Malibus.
But yes, along the way were regular hassles with engine timing and carburetor adjustments. You could DIY if you invested in a timing light and you knew what you were doing, but you could also just take it to a garage, back when indie garages could still regularly undercut ripoff dealerships.
you were listening to people calling two mechanics with their car troubles... selection bias much? if you did a radio talk show with two Tesla mechanics today, out of the tiny population of people who listen to radio, you'd find a stream of Tesla owners who were having problems.
Also, btw, Tom and Ray did always always always point out that repairing was cheaper than replacing. Most repairs are pennies. (thousands and thousands of pennies)
The comparison I'd make is not to cars from the 20th century, but the early 21st, about the last your grandfather experienced. There's a vast difference in the quality of a car from 2005 or 2010 and the equivalent from 2023, and it's not favorable to the latter.
My experience with cars from
that generation of cars and modern cars is not at all similar to yours.
My 2003 Mustang V6 manual was a complete moneypit. The electrical system went in the first year, despite me taking it regularly for maintenance. There was no traction control and it used more gas for less power than my current minivan.
My parents' 94 Taurus rusted easily and their 02 oldsmobile alero was a pure shitbox that was uncomfortable to drive and was in the shop all the time.
My 2016 Sienna and 2019 Model 3 are, by all means, better cars. (I was using the train in the meantime, much less stress than driving was) I have had zero issues (outside changing to winter tires)
I'm guessing a fair part of the population here on HN is too young to remember the Japanese takeover of the US market in the 70s and 80s. I remember my grandfather buying one and people still had the post WWII 'everything Japanese is junk' mentality going on. It was his first car to last 300k miles without an engine rebuild. Nothing US built was getting close to it at that time.
> the post WWII 'everything Japanese is junk' mentality
Yup. Even into the 70s, "Made in Japan" was a putdown. That's just about when Japanese hi-fi equipment led the charge by quality products, soon followed by automobiles.
>> I'm guessing a fair part of the population here on HN is too young to remember the Japanese takeover of the US market in the 70s and 80s
I'm old enough to remember that, and from what I recall, the objections of people I knew to buying Japanese cars were not that they were junk, they were that in some of the places I lived growing up, working at an automobile assembly plant was the best occupational outcome that a large part of the population could realistically aspire to. If those jobs disappear, then what?
That was back when the Democrats were against free trade. That all changed, their argument being that trade would make us, in aggregate, better off, and if certain parts of the population were harmed by free trade, we could use the gains of the people that benefited from trade to compensate those who were harmed.
That all happened except for the compensate those who were harmed part.
In short, a survivor bias. I didn’t thought about it and it is possibly true !
There is probably as much if not more things produced today that will last many decades, but the only one we see of the past are those which survived.
I have sort of found this - some time ago (10 years maybe?) the "average" and unresearched purchase was "average quality". You knew roughly what you were getting by buying something that was a no-name brand or on a whim etc. "Cheap and cheerful" etc - it might not last as long as the more expensive brands but it would at least work and not break after 3 uses etc.
These days it feels like you need to do extensive research to make sure you are not buying something that is total crap. Amazon is literally flooded with totally random brand named (all weirdly uppercase? EEVYUI, XAATYE, WURIHT etc) trash which 9 times out of 10 (at least) will be awful shite. I have found myself going back to "traditional retailers" for a lot of things now as I cannot trust a lot of things I order online not to be the absolute cheapest possible shite ever produced. And it's not like they are priced cheaply either - example recently was a specific light bulb I needed - Osram and Philips had models on Amazon for approx £9 which I would vaguely trust, but they were hidden in a sea of made-up brands asking £7 to £8 which you know will fail within a month or two.
That said, I don't fully agree with the sentiment. With a little research and accepting that quality costs and so not buying the cheapest/second-cheapeat models we have appliances/things that have lasted many years - washing machines, dishwashers, coffee grinders, fridges, cars etc. Some of these we have replaced for other reasons like changing needs or wanting new features (e.g. we needed a dishwasher that dried plastic things since kids stuff is all plastic - the old machine was perfectly fine when we got rid of it and yea, no one wanted it).
It is somewhat galling to think "wow why am I paying £600 for a dishwasher when I can get one for £250!?" but then £600 only seems expensive because of the crappy £250 one that will only last a month or two past the 12 month warranty.
Just need to know how to fix it and have the tools. Have to perform good maintenance. Can keep them going a while. I’ve got blankets from decade ago and that time only because I flew to different country to start life. Have stitched up bags and shirts. Fixed bikes, peloton even. Motorcycle. Ducati from 2007. Dead in crash now but good till then.
Everything I haven’t lost mostly lasts. Don’t know what to tell you. Even like 55” TV I bought in 2014 for like $500. Life’s pretty good.
I wonder if this is the symptom of ever eroding purchasing power the average western person is experiencing. Everyone is looking to stretch their income further and are willing to buy ever cheaper, but flimsy goods.
Really the only thing that will fix it is stronger warranty law, this will make things more expensive, but it will massively cut down on landfill fodder.
A refrigerator that can’t last 20 years is terrible for the environment to throw away when it lasts 3-6 like many Samsung and LG fridges do…
I will keep repairing my ancient Sears washer and dryer for as long as possible.
I know nothing about the EU, but I do know about Australia; Under consumer protection laws in Australia, AKA “statutory warranty”, goods must be fit for purpose or replaceable under warranty for the reasonable expected lifetime of the goods.
I have friends who have received a replacement fridge, under warranty, five years after the purchase date of the failed fridge — any reasonable person would expect a fridge to function for more than 5 years.
Apple have also been forced to replace MacBooks under warranty as far as 4 years out, from my anecdotal experience, and even have pages addressing expectations: https://www.apple.com/au/legal/statutory-warranty/au/
The money quote from the above link:
> For the avoidance of doubt, Apple acknowledges that the Australian Consumer Law may provide for remedies beyond 24 months for a number of its products.
It’s worth noting that the Australian consumer law states that goods must be of “acceptable quality”, or “merchantable quality”, specifically related to advertised quality and price: essentially if you are sold something more expensive for more money, it has more warranty.
This is one angle to view the problem, yes. Shrinkflation is the quintessential symptom of the problem, from the perspective of the consumer. But it's not just "how do we raise the price per pound without raising the price per unit."
Another angle to view this from is that saving money is jot worthwhile. People who get paid in dollars need to spend them quickly, so on offer around them is a plethora of goods and services that they can spend it on. Nobody saves for stuff so that stuff better be cheap, I'm sure the ideal price for an item is some function of the median weekly paycheck and apartment rent.
Viewed from yet another angle (and IMO a more informative one if you want to get at what exactly is going on here objectively) you see that inflation has a general corrosive effect on value and quality. The velocity of money increases, and the value of holding money decreases the longer it is held. So businesses trying to maximize profit have to go from getting people to spend their money to getting their money first. They have to have fast turnaround time for that capital. They have to pump out as many units as they can as fast as they can, those units have to degrade quicker than the money loses value or they can't make a profit. This creates a culture of unscrupulousness, the phenomenon compounds and speeds up over a few generations. Inflation hollows out and cheapens everything, including the culture of your society.
I have a GE refrigerator that is now 70 years old, and has never stopped working or needed repairs (at least in the 30 years I have owned it).
Doesn't have a touch screen, and there is no app to tell me what food to order, but it just keeps on running and doing what it is supposed to do. Not sure any amount of money could buy a new model that would last this long.
and before anyone says newer models are more energy efficient so I should replace it, you have to factor in the wastefulness of having thrown away 8-12 refrigerators over that 70 year time period and the impact that would have had on the environment.
It just boils down to energy/capita. While there have been some efficiency gains on the consumer usage side, the big cuts in quality come from the production side. Our lifestyles need to worsen to stop climate warming...
The author decries this phenomenon as a bad thing, and indeed it is from a sustainability perspective, but, as someone who owns a very old fridge, I have a slightly different perspective. Does my fridge work? Yes. Would I replace it if I could? Yes, definitely. Old fridges suck. They don't cool evenly. Modern fridges have much better layouts and compartments. Being able to dispense water is nice. Old fridges place the fridge below the freezer, meaning you need to bend down to access the fridge, which you access much more often than the freezer. The list goes on...
New things don't last forever, but they also don't normally need to last forever. You can't universally say the modern incarnation of something is the end-all-be-all. Generally, products are enhanced over time (modulo the enshitifcation factor), and this means people want to upgrade after certain periods of time. Making things cost more so they last longer than most peoples' desired lifespan for an object is a waste of money.
All that being said, it's never been easier to put junk out there on the market. The rise of online shopping has greatly reduced the role of "buyers" in the market. Without an experienced taste maker vouching for the quality of an item, it's very easy to end up buying shit.
First of all: survivorship bias. All of the old appliances that still work are only the ones which still work. This goes for the author's juicer.
Second: things which have investment attention now are excellent quality and things which are waning towards the end of their lifecycle are having the last few corners cut before the Private Equity firm that now owns them throws in the towel, throughly wrung dry. Author's examples:
staples - the age of paper documents is over.
matches - the Bic lighter is a modern marvel.
plastic grocery bags - banned in more places every year.
pens - same as staples.
But now, turn your eye to products being actively invested in now? Some may be at their peak this very moment.
And if you want something quality, go spend for it. I've got an industrial stapler like you wouldn't believe, 50 sheets of paper easy.
Seconded, though I'd add that with the current concerns about climate change and resource utilization, we need to think a bit more about product lifecycle and this is a reasonable way of illustrating that.
If the embodied environmental impact of a product increases 10% to make it last 100% longer then we need to think about making that change rather than producing twice as many to replace the broken ones.
one thing about some of the shitty products out there today is we got MUCH better at making things out of less material. So they break easier and wear out faster, but we've been able to reduce material usage along with price.
If you're a person who loses pens or holds onto them so long the ink dries up, it'd be better to waste an object made as cheaply as possible than one made to last.
The easiest way to clean it up significantly is to better tax industry such that energy, resource usage, and transportation are all represented in the price such that the economy actually reflects the environmental impact of production rather than just the business costs of the moment.
Indeed, and I think we should be thinking about pricing the recycling or disposal costs too (even if that's difficult or inherently imprecise), as well as giving incentives for products with effective recycling supply chains (or simply low disposal rates! i.e. longlasting products). I think it's worth not being too heavy-handed about this, because low income people would be hit the hardest most likely, but I think something like this would help significantly.
I focused in on pens as I was reading the piece because I'm something of a pen snob, something I realized when I was at a job fair one day in college and I had a brief feeling of aversion when a recruiter offered me a shitty free pen.
It's not hard to get good pens, and they're not particularly expensive. $1-2/pen will get you very solid ball-point pens that write smoothly and reliably. Some of them can be refilled to save more money and reduce waste. There are wide varieties of styles, color, and point fineness to choose from.
If you usually buy shitty pens for $0.10 each or whatever that may seem like a lot, but unless you go through multiple pens a day or something it's really not. The $10/year or so I spend on slightly nicer pens is well worth it to me.
I suspect there are probably also similar quality options available for things like staples and matches, but I'm not familiar with those.
There's another important element: the ability to judge quality.
Many people (especially baby boomers) learned a shortcut, by using brand name as a proxy for quality of goods. The problem with this is that all those brands eventually outsourced and sold themselves and cashed in on the old brand quality association. Cheapening and cheapening as the producers realized that people still bought their product no matter what the quality was. Also, people equate flair and style of product with the quality, because they aren't actually good judges of quality. You can find many cheap junk products today that retain a poor skeuomorphic shadow of their former glory. At some point consumers learned "well if it has the shiny chrome it's a good one" and producers learned they could add a chunk of shiny plastic and people would prefer their product.
Brand names are worthless now, for the most part, and if you're not good at judging quality yourself, it can be a difficult consumer landscape to navigate.
I don't buy the survivorship bias thing for the most part. My mother has her original dryer, washer, deep freezer, and refrigerator all running at her house. These are all 40+ years old except for the washer which is probably 30ish years old. Also her furnace + water heater are 40 years old. If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died.
They're name brand appliances, kenmore and whirlpool while the deep freezer is a revco. They don't look like top of the line models, probably just whatever was mid grade at the time. I thought about telling her to throw them away due to power usage but used a kill-a-watt to determine it wasn't worth it. I think the fridge and freezer each cost around $25/year to run.
n = 1 is not a great sample size for analyzing long-term trends with multiple factors (purchase price, maintenance/treatment of applicances, environment, etc)
Are you saying that none of their original appliances have died?
If not, do you realize that you claiming
" If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died."
When "these" refers exclusively to those who haven't died is the very definition of survivorship bias?
I think he's saying Mom would have definitely remembered if she had had to replace every darn appliance in her house every 2-5 years, the way we do now, before eventually lucking out to find the one good washer, dryer, dishwasher, etc. made in their respective years.
I think a washer died around 35 years ago and her current washer is 35 years old. It seems improbable that so many 40+ year old appliances survived in one home if reliability rates or ease of repair were not significantly better in the past.
You're completely right. Things also usually had a warranty longer than the nearly-universal 365-day warranty they have now. It's utterly disgusting to me that you can purchase a refrigerator -- an item which weighs like 800 pounds, has a huge amount of metal in it, and which everyone would agree would be insane to be a yearly purchase, and yet if it needs even an average repair 13 months from purchase, it can easily cost more to fix than the replacement cost and thus be totaled.
In my opinion, any device whose manufacture requires an amount of resources approaching "large appliance" levels should be required to have a 10-year parts and labor warranty. I don't care if that makes them cost more. I hope it makes them cost more. It's insane the way it is.
Everyone is saying "survivorship bias" but I don't think its that easy. How is survivorship biased by reparability? Is the widget still considered more durable if it breaks but can be fixed? I would say so.
There is some correlation here. If something 'never' breaks its not very likely to be repairable since no one will make spare parts for it. At the other side if something always breaks but is cheap in total cost, parts are commonly unavailable too, as people replace the entire item.
It's not (or at least, mostly not) survivorship bias. We aren't only talking about "Walk around a thrift store or grandma's house and grab a handful of appliances" because yup, they'll all still be working. But we can also ask our parents (or if we're over 30 ask ourselves) how many washers or dryers or mixers or blenders or televisions or whatever were required to be replaced after 6-48 months due to them spontaneously dying irreparably. Many such things did end up in the landfill then -- but mainly because people were eager to trade up to new shiny ones with better performance or features because consumer goods were improving every year back then.
(Compared to now when the main "advancements" happening to most household goods, if any, is the replacement of buttons with touchscreens and unreplaceable circuit boards, adding a wi-fi module and companion "App," and addition of subscription services.)
So let's take all the things that I had in the 90s that I had to replace because they broke:
- ...
You can say I'm only remembering the positives, honestly, I can not think of a single thing I _had_ to replace. I remember buying new things, but it was always because I wanted the new-shiny, not because I had to.
Survivorship bias isn't "only being able to remember the positives", it's _concentrating_ on the positives and neglecting to take into account the negatives.
In reality I need to consider the cost of my time. It’s much cheaper to buy new, already keyed CAT-6 cables than to split and order a raw cable end myself into an RJ45 jacket.
If reducing waste is more important to you than time, then yes by all means try to repair things. But remember everyone has different priorities.
There is a middle ground. List your broken stuff for free on facebook marketplace or wherever. There are people who have learned all the common problems with a particular appliance and will go around collecting broken ones to either fix, or use for parts.
That way there is no waste. The appliance will get fixed and resold. It also allows people to specialize their skills to repair things more optimally.
A huge number of the things most people buy weekly are made on machines not even made last century. Your grains, rice, cereals beans were probably made on a machine from the 1800's. Yep all the big brands.
My brother works at a co that makes custom repair parts for these machines he sees them all the time. They often have to fly people out to the factory to do measurements and calibrations because no documentation exists.
(Its sadly not a small mom and pop shop its one of the biggest mfg part corps in the worls. If you hoped it was some mom and pop shop that keeps these running.)
> Your grains, rice, cereals beans were probably made on a machine from the 1800's. Yep all the big brands.
I don't see how that could work: the population is far larger than it was then, so our consumption of those must be up a lot. How could a stock of machines that was suitable then could be producing even half the volume consumed now?
I'm not an expert in this area so IDK. I could ask my brother if he knows if you really want?
I imagine one of the differences is that they run 24x7x365 without any downtime unless it breaks (they never do maintenance only break/fix). These machines were super overbuilt so maybe they were never used at peak capacity back then either? Maybe there were improvements over the years? I assume the getting raw materials to the factory is much more efficient now days allowing more production then they used to be able to have?
Look how many things ran out during the pandemic. Maybe we are over capacity at many of these places already? How often do any of us head out to the middle of nowhere to check the stock levels of product regularly?
My guess is that there is a bit of telephone and/or exaggeration involved, and the kernel of truth if thare a small number of extremely old machines in operation. (But they do not handle the bulk of the production.)
If you were able to check and report back, I would be very interested!
It sounds like the author’s problems largely center around things with motors and pumps, which tbh doesn’t surprise me. The high-end brand I’ve been most disappointed with in that regard has been Dyson. Been through about 4 of their full size and hand vacs.. so many random issues. Really not worth it.
How long do you keep your cars? These are machines that can last a few decades on lower end models as long as you go for durability over fanciness, and provide the nominal amount of maintenance
This guy says he lives in Montana. That is probably part of the problem.
I live in a major metro area. It seems like for anything I could possibly want, there is a shop that sells it at whatever quality level I desire. And repairs... People are always saying that you can't fix anything. But that's not true. Just last year my oven stopped working; the local repairman sent the circuit board to a place nearby that "rebuilt" it (checked every component, desoldered and replaced anything that wasn't perfect).
Yep, houses are expensive in the big city. Taxes are crazy in the big city. But the economy supports having durable stuff. If your only option is Target and Amazon, I can understand feeling like nothing you buy works.
Oh, and don't get me started about pens. Come on. A Pilot Metropolitan and a bottle of ink that will last 5-10 years will set you back a whole $40. And then you only need to buy more ink.
All of this rings painfully true for home appliances. Besides a lucky break with an air fryer (knock on wood), all our non-shitty kitchen items are at least 15 years old. My 1-year old HP printer is obtuse and stupid. Even my $1900 work-issued ThinkPad is rife with stupid driver bugs.
My workshop tools, however, don't seem to be affected. My soldering iron? Absolute tank. Milwaukee drill bits? I abuse them, and they don't care. Even the mid-grade Craftsman multimeter is totally competent.
I’ve had to buy a lot of furniture and other things for my new house this year, and one of the things that really sticks out to me is that practically every category of product seems to be split into a bimodal distribution: cheap crap & luxury boutique.
There are practically no entries occupying the middle of the market that are on the basic end regarding features & frills but also high-quality.
It’s incredibly annoying. I can either get an absolute trash sofa for less than $1,000 or I can get a high-end, high-quality one for $5000+. Now there are definitely sofas that occupy the price range between those, but they’re almost all just wildly overpriced garbage that’s no better than the sub-$1000 junk. The same goes for dining tables, cabinetry, window treatments, cooking appliances, etc. I end up just scouring for “vintage” stuff that’s in decent shape whenever possible. It’s like I have this whole other full-time job trying to find quality used goods because the only things I can just get new immediately are garbage.
That's a mind-boggling anecdote. As an example, Crate and Barrel are known to make good, high-quality couches, and many of them are far less than $5000
My friend bought a townhouse in Seattle just a few months ago, and bought a C&B (very nice) couch for it at around $3000. It was delivered within a week or two of ordering, so I believe they're available.
When I bought my couch in late 2019 it was also delivered within a couple of weeks.
Are you custom ordering something? I believe that common configurations ship immediately, but any kind of customization requires that multiple-month lead time.
I think you and the parent likely have different standards of quality. Crate and Barrel makes nicer couches but they're still made the same way with the same materials as what you get from Value City Furniture. They're still engineered wood, polyblend fabric and filling, and "genuine" leather.
It's really hard to find anything non-antique that uses better materials or craftsmanship. They do exist and I own a few pieces but the prices for such things will make you blush. There's no middle anymore where you forgo labor intensive details like hand-carved detailing, complex bends and shapes, hand stitching, embroidered patterns, or fancy internal mechanisms but keep the "can still last generations" build quality for somewhat reasonable prices.
* Frames are benchmade with hardwood that's kiln-dried to prevent warping
* Hardwood legs
* Polyfoam seat cushions wrapped in fiber-down blend and encased in downproof ticking (is this "bad"? I think they're plenty comfortably and haven't shown any significant wear in the past four years)
I went to try to see conclusively if you were correct. A pretty basic sofa at C&B is $1,800 - $2,000. In 1990 you could buy a basic Bassett sofa at J.C. Penney for $599 [1] -- $1407 in 2023 dollars. Furniture from Sears and Penney's (regardless of whether it was fashionable) was of fine quality, in that it held up for decades. I know because we had furniture like this in our home at the time.
So this tells me that the price for a sofa (that is made domestically and not slapped together from particle board, a half inch of foam, and about 4 springs) has gone up by 25-30%. And I think you're saying that therefore, this isn't an utterly crazy price hike. I'd agree it's modest.
Thing is, I think what's changed is demographics. In 1990, a LOT of people bought furniture at a department store or furniture store. They could afford it, but also here's the interesting part: It was much more rare then to find a $250 sofa. If that was your budget, you just bought a used good sofa and you probably got a better product. When super cheap everything appeared in the late 90s, it drove out the good manufactured goods, and many of the stores that sold those good items. People felt like buying the quality of things they used to buy would be extravagant, since they could buy an IKEA or Walmart version for less than half, and also, many families started to be worse off financially than their parents' generation had been, adding to their feelings of frugality. Unfortunately, this crap is so shoddy in most cases that it's actually more expensive when you factor in its lifetime.
Bedbugs had been suppressed to the point that you were very unlikely to ever encounter them 30-50 years ago. That's no longer the case.
I wouldn't even consider a piece of used upholstered furniture today, regardless of price or product quality.
That used sofa today represents a large risk to my wallet, property and health that it mostly didn't in the peak pesticide era.
Poor people are aware of the same - and if possible they too will opt for the shit-tier couch they can afford vs running that risk with a nice used one that would have been valued the same 30 years ago.
> absolute trash for less than $1,000 or high-end, high-quality for $5000+
I've been noticing the same thing. But I also suspect that many people pay a little more for stuff, expecting that to make it better. The number of brands and variety of prices one can find on-line is astounding, and it must be much larger than the number of factories in Asia actually making the stuff.
The luxury boutique ones are also junk. I got a very expensive sofa from a boutique brand and I regret it every bit. In less than a year, the cushions are basically useless. All cheap junk, made in some third world country in Asia.
Well they might be, and they might not be. The old saying "you get what you pay for" ought to be "you get at most what you pay for". If you buy the expensive product, it might be higher quality, or it might be the cheap junk with a shiny logo.
I bought a small dining table and 4 chairs from a nearby store that specializes in Scandinavian furniture. I ended up mixing and matching 2 pairs of chairs because I liked the contrast of 2 different styles at different sides of the table. Anyhow, fast forward about 15 years and 4 house moves and the table and 2 of the chairs are rock solid. The other 2 chairs are wobbly junk that I've repeatedly tried to fix but am about to give up on. The table and 2 good chairs were made in Denmark, the 2 shit chairs were made in Malaysia and are just "Scandinavian style" I guess. So yeah, decent stuff is still out there, but perhaps it's harder than ever to parse the marketplace and figure out which items are the high-quality ones. Even if you go to a store with lots of quality stuff, they might have some junk mixed in as they try to expand their market.
I'm curious. My previous soft was from Ikea. Of course Ikea makes cheap disposable furniture but this sofa, IMO, was not one of those. It was made of real wood, not particle board. It was super well designed. It assembled into 4 parts using slots and a few very large steal bolts and was also easy to disassemble for moving. It's entire cover was easy to remove so you could clean stains or easily replace it. Same for the cushions. And it was comfortable. It was under $1000 (note: I know Ikea redesigns things so the same soft today might not be as good as that same model from 2016)
Moving overseas I had to buy a new sofa in 2021. Middle of COVID, Ikea didn't have any I couldn't wait. The sofa I ended up with is the cheapest shit sofa I've ever owned. The materials are clearly inferior. No part of it is cleanable. The cushions are one sided so can not flip them in 4 directions, they only fit one way. I got tired of looking and settled on these though, expecting to replace them.
Anyway, my point was (a) I understand your POV but also (b) there are possibly some good under $1000 sofas. I've had similar luck with a few Ikea dining room tables that were solid wood, not particle board.
Let me also add, in many other categories, I've rarely found a correlation between price, brand, and quality.
Worst luggage I ever owned was Rimowa. It was the most expensive I've bought and broke several times. They'd fix it, but who wants to spend their vacation taking their luggage to the repair shop (and lugging it full from the airport to the hotel while it's broke)
Worst and most expensive jacket I ever bought, Paul Smith, got a hole in the main pocket within 30 days and the hanging hook in the collar broke in 2 weeks.
Worst jeans I ever bought, Diesel. Ripped in 1 month.
Both those brands are exactly that - brands - where a lot of the cost of the product is recycled right back into advertising to convince you that the brands are actually worth the prices they charge.
When buying clothing, it's worthwhile to spend a little bit of time learning what makes quality clothing and what doesn't. That's very helpful in avoiding over-branded garbage being sold for far more than it cost to make in a sweatshop.
Weird, Rimowa is one of the best suitcases I've ever owned. I've never had any other suitcase roll so smoothly. The exterior shell has some marks and whatnot (mostly due to careless handling), but the overall product is excellent...
Ikea has some good stuff and some cheap stuff. Their thing is that even their cheap stuff _looks_ good and fits with the look of more expensive ones.
Our current dining room table is from Ikea. 100% birch. It'll outlast us all, it cost about 30% of a similar boutique one. The chairs are plastic/wood composite from Ikea, cheap AF but still fit perfectly with the table.
> Now there are definitely sofas that occupy the price range between those, but they’re almost all just wildly overpriced garbage that’s no better than the sub-$1000 junk.
The same goes for bicycles. Except that the "junk" are mostly functional (if not durable) and might be less attractive to thieves.
Yea, I've been trying to find a proper TV stand/entertainment center.
The options are: Ikea Cardboard (my current choice), or design/looks first boutique stuff that's not meant to hold anything except a TV (no holes for wiring etc - things that the Ikea one has...)
Currently I'm looking at local carpenters, it's gonna be about the same for a fully custom built hardwood unit vs the boutique choice.
The problem in being in the middle ground - what do you optimize for in a way that is easily marketable? The easiest answers are: cheapest (quality be damned) or best quality (affordability be damned). It’s hard to communicate a compromise between value and quality and that’s why that zone is empty. I believe this is a by product of online shopping where brands only get seconds to communicate their value prop.
This is a self-limiting belief. The middle category exists, if you go looking for it. It's still a second job to find it though. You need to learn about the materials, construction techniques, and even manufacturing and white label trends of the industry in question.
It's exhausting. But after spending a month or two studying, you will be able to find pieces constructed to last a lifetime.
For sofas try the Insider's Guide to Furniture. Plenty of brands in the middle range using hardwood construction, made in the USA, with high density foam.
Yea we got something from... uh... (Insert place I'll go look up), which let us select the specific fabric, and took awhile (months?), but was pretty solid. For yea, around $2.5-$3k for a rather huge couch - something like two separate 2m couches that fit together in an L shape.
There are economics papers about ‘the vanishing middle’ that explain why products go bimodal. (I can’t find them right now; google-foo is failing me.)
The gist I remember is that people lock onto a single differentiator: normally cost or quality. This moves most of producers to those outside points. Companies ‘trying’ to stay in the middle end up being more expensive (on a cost/quality measure) because they can’t reach mass production as easily as either the cheap or fancy.
> I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill.
I purchased a Capresso Infinity Conical Burr Grinder from Amazon.com on Aug 21, 2020 for $157.94 and have used it, at a minimum, once per day every day I have woken up at home for three years (at least 1,000 times) and it shows no signs of slowing down.
If my definition of "a lot" correct and is "greater than three" then the author might want to have his or her wiring checked.
Also, as far as staples go, premium staples that can fasten (practically) paper to sheet metal are $0.20 more per 1,000-count than garbage staples. Buy the premium staples that come in a plastic box with a hinged lid instead of the cardboard bricks of staples and you'll never have a jam again.
> The two or three new pens I use each week that, because no ink comes out of them
Ok this is just ridiculous.
TWO TO THREE. PENS. PER WEEK. This has moved into the realm of satire.
Buy Pilot G2 pens. Problem solved. They'll still write after going through the wash.
Where is this person getting their pens?
What are they doing to their pens?
What is going on?
Am I high?
That being said I have nearly no problems with the quality of any purchases I've made because I pay, at a minimum, the inflation adjusted equivalent of what I would have paid 20 years ago for the same product. I also research everything obsessively. Like, read the manual and watch YouTube teardowns of microwaves before buying a new microwave obsessively. I have many fewer things than most Americans but all of my shit is the nicest it can possibly be within my budget.
The race to the bottom is a race I do not participate in.
The fact that he highlighted multiple products purchased from Target is interesting. Is he unaware that Target is a discount chain? You're accepting a higher risk of a defective product by shopping there. If the product is garbage you return it. If you want a better guarantee than that you shop at a better store and pay for it.
My advice on electric coffee grinders: just buy a manual one with a hex shaft, and drive it with a brushless drill. I've been making drill coffee for years now.
I wouldn't drive it with a drill because too fast and you'll damage the augur pretty badly. I just hand crank mine, it takes a little time and slows my pace, gives me a minute to think and it's a small work out.
"The reduction in the purchasing power of money is similar to a form of taxation... As people start spending more and saving less, they become more present oriented in all their decision making... this helps explain why civilizations prosper under a sound monetary system, but disintegrate when their monetary systems are debased."
You're missing the point. I actually had this realization on my own and had heard that the concept was outlined in the book which is what prompted me to read it.
Cheap money cheapens everything, because the velocity of money is high and so capital turnover is the name of the game. To make a profit, what you sell has to be cheaper than the money you get. It cheapens people because they have to constantly be scratching for a buck just to keep up.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadMaybe I should try paying for Consumer Reports
So, their interest in getting me to spend more money is at odds with my interest in buying a quality product (or skipping it if they all suck!). At least Consumer Reports is a paid product who only gets paid by me.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bath-towel/
Meanwhile we've gone through Parachute, Brooklinen, some sheets and towels from Macy's, and nothing seems to last.
I don't know enough about the brands they sell, but thinking we might buy from here next: https://linensociety.com/
Perhaps they are more worth it for cars, though that is not a frequent purchase.
CR is inexpensive enough to be worth it for a homeowner - there is always something breaking that needs replacing - but not as worthwhile as I would hope. I often wind up buying based on poor signals such as brand name and online ratings.
You'll need digital calipers as well. You can cheap out for $20, or get Mitutoyo's for $200.
A scanner's also nice in scanning a geometry thats flat, but not required.
Just with a 3d printer and a meager ket, you can replace most current commercial crap in a few hours, and have the replacement as a file you can call on any time.
That's how I'm handling this "throw away culture" shit. I'm replicating what I need and throwing away the actual broken bits.
Reduce, Reuse, REPAIR, Recycle. (Hint: the manufacturers want you to forget the 4th, hidden R.)
It’s not deliberate that they make stuff that fails, they build stuff that lasts only as long as it needs.
KitchenAid switched to all-metal gears on their high-end models fairly recently. In the past, all models had a nylon gear, but the new high-end mixers use electronics to protect the motor.
TL;DR: The Pro Line is what you want. These have higher-wattage motors and are made with all-stainless steel. This is important if you mix heavy things like doughs or meats frequently, as these materials tend to stress and shear plastic more easily.
It doesn't actually move slowly at the stir speeds and sounds atrocious.
> there's not much you can do wrong
That’s right, which means that the repair jobs are probably failing or incorrect…
I would argue that a $250 toaster today is still not a "buy it for life" item, but it would certainly have a lot of bells and whistles and almost no user-serviceable parts.
The heating elements should be replaceable!
That rave review was for an identical toaster with different guts, or with amazon reviews, something else entirely.
What were the issues you were having?
We've been using a cheapo £10 tesco or argos one for the past few years. It toasts..
I used Dualit in various places, it does as good or bad a job, can't tell the difference.
I love the Dualit idea, but in the end can't justify the price, not for this particular kitchen item.
Every few years I have to shake out the bread remains and that's about all maintenance it gets.
Works like a charm and the outcome is very predictable.
Granted, I only use it for sliced toast bread. But I'm happy with the results.
My second biggest issue is related to the same mechanism: the "pop" is impotent and does nothing to eject what's being toasted. The most I can hope for is that I can manually push the lever up.
The next biggest issue is with heating element distance. If there's anything that is wider than a slice of wonder bread it's going to get sizzled by the heating element. In the worst cases it causes smoke to be emitted for several runs afterwards.
(Ok, fair, that's only $2,500)
Quite annoying…
Even with Dualit, I would still only purchase from a professional catering retailer. Just in case, there’s any differences, and the fact that purchasing from a professional catering retailer, implies a greater level of longevity, if it ever did breakdown - for potential small claims court, reasons, in the future.
Regardless, Dualit also pretty much make every part of their toasters replaceable, for this exact reason. Hence why I think it’s one of the only decent toasters, out there!
https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/gp/product/B07PHLN9DD
I imagine anything that would break in a toaster is absolutely trivial to fix, but you are working with mains electricity so in most places you probably need a license to service it. Which just costs more than a brand new toaster.
It cost less than $250. It warms, bakes, roasts, dehydrates, as well as 10 other settings. It has 3 different racks, so I can toast 3-4x as much bread than I could in a regular toaster.
I’ve only had it for 6 years, but it has held up nicely, no issues whatsoever. I guess what I am trying to say, is that the product is the bells and whistles these days.
If you're not aware, they had a recall on a bunch of models recently, you should check to see if yours was one of them!
Fortunately my model is not on the list of recalled products. The one I use is an older version of the `Cosori - Original Air Fryer - Silver`.
Not if you buy one that is $250 because it has bells and whistles. You can buy a $250 dollar toaster that is just a toaster and it will be of good quality.
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/waring-wct708-4-slice-comme...
The problem isnt that long lasting, durable products no longer exist.
It's that they're no longer marketed for home use.
You can get stuff just as good as back in the '60s, for comparable after-inflation prices. But they don't sell them at Sears or HomeSense, they sell them at industrial or kitchen or office supply stores.
Maybe, for the environment's sake, people should be buying and using appliances for 70 years. But do people actually want a kitchen full of appliances that are 35 years old on average? Probably not, thrift shops are still full of contemporarily made appliances that were discarded before their useful life ended.
"was hoping it lasted longer & would be better quality but was disappointed" "All the coils do no not glow and It toasts unevenly" "one side stops working after 6 months or so. I’ve gone through three of these" "Bought two of these toasters both stopped working" "Have to replace this toaster about once a year, one side will always stop working" "Lasted me about a month or so and it no longer works". "Died so quickly!"
I think this is a perfect example of the problem. There is a market for $250 toasters, but even for that price you can't buy a reliable toaster.
Either way, the bathtub curve of product failure still applies no matter the price point.
Bear in mind that people on this site are using toasters at duty cycles hundreds to thousands of times higher than home users. 6 months of commercial use of one of these toasters could very easily be a lifetime of use for a single home.
these cost about US$4 locally: https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-934643608-tostador-... (the price listed on that page is $3499 but currently the black-market dollar is at $950 bid, $1000 ask, so that's a bit under US$4)
but i got mine out of the neighbor's garbage during our eight-month-long covid lockdown, gambling that it wasn't covered with cyanide or something
the electric kind you're probably talking about goes for about US$20–US$40 around here but i wanted to point out that there does exist a more reliable alternative
Although I admit to some scepticism. Seems likely that some toasters will turn out to be of high quality.
Features that increase longevity or repairability are considerably less legible to most consumers and therefore get removed first when trying to cut costs.
That's the name I gave to an old blender I had 25 years ago when I lived on my own while studying. The blender was an Oster brand and only had an on/off switch. I sold it to a friend when I left that city.
Fast forward 25 years, my friend told me that his mom is still using the same blender. No programs, no memories, no modes. Just Off and "fuck you" mode haha.
Now I also want a toaster with similar properties. Just let me put my bread slices, click a button and give me my good sliced bread. That's all I need. And hopefully that simplicity makes the gizmo last 20+ years.
https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s2/product/philips-toaster-toaster...
I'm sure it's available wherever you live for around 30$ or so.
https://www.geappliances.com/profile-laundry#front-load
Smart wash! Smart rinse! Smart dispense! AI enabled!
And if you go buy a commercial toaster it will (likely) last as long as one of those old toasters on average.
This said those old appliances could be fixed, but today the labor costs of having someone else do it would be astronomical for most people. A significant portion of the total cost.
I've grown so disillusioned with these "products" that I've started trying to make them myself instead of buying them. It's difficult though. Even something "simple" like a high quality knife requires a lot of skill to create. I want to create at least one before I die though.
That’s the real problem is that the luxury tier of so many markets has thoroughly enshittified. I generally trust that Apple computers are Toyotas and a few other brands tend to last (or at least have robust enough support structures in place like with the former) enough that I feel more comfortable owning them but few others earn that trust from me.
I’ve heard good things about Miele vacuums, but apparently only the heavy duty canister vacs. Their more consumer friendly uprights are apparently mediocre. Other appliances I have no idea.
If you want appliances that last, buy the commercial ones. Hobart makes an under counter dishwasher that you can bet will never wear out and can be repaired.
Shell out for an industrial washing machine like they have at the laundromats. Those things are made to run all day for years. If they break down, they're repairable.
Previously bought a much cheaper dishwasher for my previous house that is still going strong. I found a geeky person on the sales floor that dealt with dishwasher returns and asked his advice for buying a reliable one: his advice seems to have been solid. I recommend trying this approach.
Unfortunately we can no longer trust brand names. Most previously trustworthy brands have turned to shit. I now mostly aim for mediocrity because that seems to be the sweet spot (cheap is usually trash, expensive usually is poor value for money).
It is very difficult to make good decisions for most purchases - requiring too much effort and brainspace. I never want to learn the details of appliances but I am given little choice.
The other problem is that the UX/UI of many modern devices has gone to complete shit. Searching for a usable appliance is a nightmare.
If there were a brand that released exactly one of each appliance, over-built that one model, and invested the budget in robust components instead of wifi smart home touch screen bullshit, I would love to stop becoming an expert in all these product categories.
Industrial - or old school, Hoovermatic twin tub, where you can choose the exact length(s), of your wash/rinse - albeit, by babysitting it.
High quality toasters still exist - be they in conveyer belt form, salamander grills, or the old stalwart: the Dualit professional models.
The same applies to microwaves, hobs, ovens, ranges (combined hob/oven), et al.
Hand made in the UK, fully mechanical and you can get spare parts for it.
There's very little that can fail, it doesn't have a spring that brings the toast up, you need to push the lever yourself. Even the timer is fully mechanical.
They only sell spares for the higher end models. We have a basic Dualit toaster which you can't get spares for (although it has been reliable so far).
But there are a few good things out there if you know where to look.
Tools, especially, have good options. But then I use a lot of those professionally and get to experiment using someone else's time and money.
I don't care too much about some of the things the author talks about. A suitcase not able to stand up when full is annoying, but also well within my ability to fix. I guess I'm just conditioned to junk.
The one thing that pisses me off the most is how the swiffer (mop) handle isn't strong enough for mopping. We've broken over a dozen of them in the exact same spot. We have taken to repairing them ourselves with a plastic welder.
They already have a freaking subscription model built in with their stupid pads and incredibly overpriced fluids, at least the mop could be really well-built and a pleasure to use.
Noteworthy example. Current Pyrex-branded kitchenware is no longer borosilicate glass.
I shattered a Pyrex casserole dish with what I guess was probably thermal shock, by moving it out of the oven, into a stainless steel sink.
The other thread mentioned that they license rights to use "pyrex" (vs "Pyrex") to pretty much anyone, but the capital-P brand should still be the OG company. Maybe that was relevant in your case.
[1]: https://www.allrecipes.com/article/what-is-the-difference-be...
But then he mentions a "hybrid sedan". Here I'm aware of the data. It's not close. Modern cars are much, much more reliable and durable than ones built at any time in the past.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/automobiles/as-cars-are-k...
[1] https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2021-us-vehi...
Forget "durability" - safety is paramount. Those old cars were tanks, simpler, last longer and easier to repair but absolute death traps and dump smog.
[Edit]
Guess they didn't last longer, either way I'm happy to leave behind the cars of yester-year... even the 90's a bit sketch (though WAYYYY better).
Modern engines are way more reliable because they have coatings and materials that will last nearly indefinitely in most parts of the engine but they're built on proprietary sensors and electronics that need a steady stream of replacements and secret software to debug.
We could make cars last indefinitely from a supply chain perspective, but commoditizing software and electronics would make them very marginally more expensive. We absolutely can't have that because, drum roll for the 1000th time, 99% of the population doesn't give a flying fuck and wants cheap shit at all costs.
I am looking to purchase a new family vehicle in the future but with all the softwares, screens, and fancy stuffs I am not sure if I liked it. Anyone feels this way?
I'm not. It's a Honda.
My wife bought a used Accord before we got married. Eventually it died on the highway and we had it towed to the dealer. The engine needed to be replaced because of the failure of a part that had been recalled (when it was owned by the previous owner) had not been replaced. Since it was due to a recalled part, Honda replaced the engine for the price of the oil.
We bought Hondas for the next 20 years after that. We still own a 2012 Accord that my son is running into the ground. Our current car is a Volvo, lots of nice features, but I think our next will be a Honda.
We took it to the dealer many times, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong either. That didn’t stop them from trying, by replacing whatever part was their best guess and charging us for the new one plus labor. During our final visit to the dealer, only a few blocks away, the car broke down. It limped, smoking, to the dealer where they found the AC compressed had seized causing the timing belt to melt, which then took out the alternator and several other components. After a $5,000 repair and assurances the problem must be fixed, we took it home and had a nice month’s worth of driving, and then it started bricking again. We couldn’t sell it fast enough, what a nightmare.
To their partial credit, Honda later reimbursed half the repair cost, and the dealer admitted the vehicle failure was design flaws that were out of our control. We also found out after the repair that the AC compressor had been recalled, but unfortunately the new one didn’t fix the problem.
Tl;dr I did before I bought it, but I personally no longer believe Honda to be more reliable than any other brand. One major problem across the industry now is that they know how to make good reliable engines and powertrains, but none of them are any good at computer software reliability, and computers have very suddenly taken over all critical systems in the car.
If you are really having this car repaired 4 times a year for 18 years (72 repairs) this doesn't sound like a reliable machine. A modern Toyota or Honda can go many years with 0 repairs, just consumables.
1. Small production batches,
2. Low typical usage - most RR owners do not use it to commute on a daily basis, hence do not face high reliability requirements,
3. The ability of the typical buyer to overspend on maintenance, whether preemptively or on-demand.
Which RR would do to avoid the obvious problem, only after a supplier has been verified to be sending only the highest quality product, would they ease off.
The simplest thing is that the supplier charges double or triple the unit price such that they can accept half the parts failing inspection and getting sent back.
Or another way: you an QC a bolt to death, but that doesn't tell you if it's undersized for the design.
Do you not know how car manufacturing works?
Anyways you don't have to take the quality of RR parts on my word if you still think it's impossible, just go a showroom and inspect it yourself.
Even a high-resource prototyping program can only go so far with scenarios like - wear and tear/part fatigue, adverse environmental conditions, local peculiarities (e.g. regulatory requirements for uncommon configurations), unintended but common maintenance mistakes etc.
For example, a Fiat car my family owned suffered a cascade drivetrain failure after about 9 years on the road. I don't think a prototyping program could have captured that ahead of time.
The fact that the showroom RR parts look fine only indicates that the parts are ok immediately after manufacturing; it does not promise they'll work fine after several years even if treated will.
Which is why automakers typically recommends a maintenance schedule that catches the vast majority of potential failures before they occur on the road.
How does this, or anecdotes of your family's Fiat, relate to engineering and verification practices of parts coming in from suppliers?
Check this out where the clock spring is the same as a bmw part and just the knobs are fancier (and swappable!):
https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/18m5...
The rapid exodus of carburetors shocked and dismayed many right-to-repair folks, but I think we now see with laptops and cell phones that all else equal, consumer preference strongly favors trading repair headaches for the otherwise more compelling product (thinner, faster, lighter, more powerful, etc)
30-40 years ago, if your lawnmower broke down you'd ask Dave from two doors down to come and have a look at it.
Now, you'd either take it to a professional repairman (and get it back 2 weeks and $100+ later), try to work it out yourself via online tutorials, or just throw it in the bin.
Either way, it's far more painful for a product to bee temporarily out of service these days than it once was.
There's a book that goes over it called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, but that is two decades old now and clearly didn't capture everything.
Sure, you have to have a small 'bug-out bag' (in this case a belt pack) with spare parts (bolts, belts, master links etc.) and some critical sockets if you want to take a ride without fear, but beyond that the thing is a tank. Even the most critical of problems can be fixed for minimal expenditure at Harbor Freight and/or a local motorcycle parts shop.
Aside from being fun, and confusing people every time they see it in the parking lot next to the Tesla/Rivian/Mercedes AMG crew, it is serious peace of mind that I've always got motorized transport that won't fail me.
https://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/diagnosing-car...
I think newer cars seem to be more reliable but older cars probably lasted longer than you think, it’s just that your view is skewed due to the market you’re used to (reading your link, while a million miles is a lot, though not unheard of for a taxi, the mention of 17 years as if that’s and old car is something I find surprising.
It’s common where I live to see cars from the 60s or 70s still being driven. And I don’t mean maintained classics (though those exist too), I mean just old rusty cars that still work.
All this to say that while you’re most likely right about newer cars being more reliable (and they’re certainly safer, which is more important), that doesn’t mean older cars stopped working after 20 or 30 years, it just seems your view is skewed because you live in a place where a 17yo car is considered old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Especially the 70s US cars and somewhat later were complete shit and lead to the meteoric rise of Japanese cars in the US. Almost nothing US built those days got close to 100k miles without massive amounts of rebuilding.
In my country the closest example for those years would be the Alfa Romeo, which led to a popular saying here in the 80s that an Alfa made you happy twice: when you bought it, and when you sold it!
It's more like saying that someone who's 7 && depends on factory-only parts, processors, and software, that wont be available in 20 years, with ever more complex designs being pushed in between, will not make it to 70.
The Toyota Prius debuted in the US in 2000. I’d argue 23 years is simply not sufficient to make an argument about long term reliability—particularly given that sales took a while to ramp, and any issues in, say, the first 10 years are likely to be dismissed as teething problems.
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cars-that-will-la...
I've owned two Toyotas, neither ever broke down, and one of them saved my life (in a crash). If I were in the market for a car, I'd get a Toyota.
But you can tell a bit about their long term reliability by looking at heavy users like Taxis and Ubers.
The Prius is used because it is cheap, cheap to run, and cheap to maintain -- even by outlier users like Uber drivers (also note drivers are usually buying consumer versions).
Arguing about 23 years is a strawman - which would mean you could never buy anything new because new models haven't yet had even a few years of usage prediction.
This was a fun read and I agree in sentiment to the rage of all the crap from target that falls apart in 10 minutes but I feel like I've developed an ok sense if when I'm taking this risk and am less frustrated when something cheap fails. Essentially any time I buy anything but a book from Amazon or anything but cereal and vodka from Target. Ultimately I think the crapification of lowend consumer goods has just made me buy less crap, which feels good I think. I've also accepted a pretend scifi narrative in which the only kind of society that doesn't descend into anarchy is one where people are constantly buying and throwing away cheap crap.
And as an aside I have one of those crazy juicers but I stopped using it because it scares my wife and smells like burning / ozone.
I used a Kindle 2 e-reader daily for ~14 years and, aside from decreased battery life, it was still great. Sadly I eventually stepped on it one too many times and the screen cracked.
I might fix it for ~$20 with ebay parts if I ever get bored enough.
And, boy, does it make good coffee.
We admire the Victorian era bridge still in use but forget all the bridges that long ago collapsed, and ignore the overconstruction required of the survivors because mechanical theory was still developing at the time.
Also we used to have more single-application devices; while a juicer is often still a single-application device today, at the other extreme our phone has absorbed a deskfull of other single-application devices (and more). Usually with some improved reliability, some less, and also some loss of affordance.
Engineers tend to put care into building bridges that don't collapse, and have been doing so for millenia so collapses can happen, but are rare. "All the bridges that long ago collapsed" is in my opinion not all that many bridges, really [1], and lots of people remember the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. I still remember the bridge collapse from the Northridge quake too.
Bridges are a special case of civic architecture where long durability and long reliability are taken into account that are kind of a special class, so they're probably not a great thing to generalize from.
[1] You can judge for yourself from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures
We see this in the evolution of many technologies, from boiler explosions (especially in trains) that are pretty much unknown today to jet air travel (likewise at a rather extraordinary state of safety) and many others besides (consider the implementation and impact of vaccination).
Gumby's point that the Victorian era bridges we still have were over-engineered is I think a good point. However we might like to say that they were well-engineered, but I bet that even they have been in a state of on-and-off if not constant repair.
1. Stove died in about 2007 2. Washer/dryer were replaced with something "better", although they were still running in 2009 3. Dishwasher died in 2011 4. Refrigerator was replaced but still running in 2013
This was not just survivorship bias. Basically all of these appliances lasted at least 30 years. They were from good brands (Washer/dryer and dishwasher were Maytag), but I don't think you can buy an appliance today that you can truly expect to last 30 years. At the least, there will be some sort of control board that will give out after 10-15 years and won't be available anymore.
Another data point: Just replaced a washer from the early 90s (German low-price brand, "Privileg") with one from the 2010s by a higher-priced brand (Bosch). Both were used. Reason for replacement: small top-loader for larger standard washer.
Both were obviously bought used.
The newer one broke within six months. The old, 30-year old one still works. The defect was a mechanical one, not the PCB. But notably, the still-functioning washer has no digital controls.
I know, anecdata is no data. But for this kind of appliance, I'd bet my arm that their lifetime has decreased substantially.
We started renting that house out in 2010 and bought a different house that had appliances that were about 7 years old (based on what the previous owner had told us). We had to replace the dishwasher in 2012 (so it was 9 years old then) and since then we had to replace it again in 2022 (at 10 years). Had to replace the fridge in 2014 (11 years).
> We test our commercial quality machines to 10,400 cycles or roughly 25 years of life in an average household.
> You probably want to hear that we test our electronic controls to one million depressions…yes, we actually do.
https://speedqueen.com/speed-queen-difference/
This has to be a race to the bottom and yeah, technically somehow it did sort of wash our clothes, but it was a huge hassle.
Bullshit.
Mercedes-Benz W123.
You can buy a nice burr grinder from a company that not only sells spare parts for at least 5 years after they stop selling the model, but who also shares youtube videos on how to disassemble and repair the grinder. Mine is 11.5 years old and I replaced the central gear when it stripped around year 7 or 8, after grinding 2-3 coffees a day, probably 150+ kg of coffee, for that time. However, it wasn't cheap, and people appear not to care. Baratza, btw.
For myself I do the 'harbor freight' tool buying method. I buy a cheap whatever first, and if it's something I find useful and demand higher quality then I more research into what quality is with at least some experience.
This said, I've also had a lot of cheap tools that have effectively lasted far longer than expected so crap doesn't always fail fast.
But many of the plain Parkside branded tools are utter crap. The oscillating sander with exchangeable triangular, rectangular, and circular attachments I got was made of way to little material to be useful. The plastic struts for the attachments (the process of swapping those being horribly inefficient) partly melted with use.
The Parkside drill press I have isn't too bad, but I had to fix a mechanical failure where the part which connects the manual up-down thingy to its gear just sheared off because it was a tiny rolled piece of metal sheet instead of a solid piece of 4mm diameter steel. I fixed that (replacing that bit with part of a bolt tapped into the axle) and it is doing fine now, but still.
There's still plenty of manufacturers out there today offering quality products, but in almost every market there are clones and cheap imitations.
The poor man pays twice is a motto I often recall as I grit my teeth and hand over my credit card for appliances.
Some old plastics de-polymerised badly in heat. A lot of old chrome and tin plating corrodes. Bone handled cutlery is not designed for dishwashers. Sure, the mix master is going strong but it was gold plated when my mother in law got it. Same with the cast aluminium mincer.
That said, I fixed a 24 year old magimix by replacing the motor starter, everything else is fine except its on its second polycarbonate bowl since dishwashers: now only washed by hand.
Anecdotally, I've lost count of modern kitchen appliances such as blenders, coffee makers, cooking "processors", that have died on me. And not cheap either, basically mid-tier stuff. Any such device with extra digital "smarts" and a monitor in particular is a huge red flag.
Whereas I still have some inherited such electric appliances from the 70s and 80s that still go strong (and whenever they did, they're totally fixable).
They often only buy long lasting equipment, and the market shows it. It's hella expensive, but that's what you pay for.
Right now, their earphones lightning won’t last a year anymore. I have been buying it yearly for 3 years now.
I bought another pair back in I want to say 2019, and it's been just OK. The inline mute broke, but everything else about them seems just as quality (no pleather ear caps tho - just fabric which I think is an improvement).
In between those purchases, I've bought a handful of other headsets, all around 50-120$. They were universally crap. Either shit cables, shit comfort, or just wore out really fast.
Anyway, long story short - you can get some lasting quality products. It's super hard to tell when a brand has sold out to the capitalism devil though.
I continue to buy older cars because this has been false for me everywhere I've experienced new cars (borrowed, friends, my own).
Pointing out lack of data to support an argument that relies on anecdotal evidence is good practice. However:
- The anecdotal evidence is strong amongst older people
- Data not existing doesn't mean it _can't_ exist
I suspect that younger people are just used to things not working, so they don't complain. Then there's the fact that there is no incentive for anyone else to show things could be better (except the old codgers like myself, but we're not a profitable demographic).
I scour online auctions for old gear, because I know it'll work. Hi-Fi systems built in the 90s for example, were the panicle of hi-fi. Heck, I even have a CRT from _thirty years ago_ that still works like new (now think of your smart T.V. in thirty years).
Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?
http://imgur.com/a/r834D
My dad's cars from the same era didn't fare so well and all required heavier repairs; none still work.
Also, since we're talking anecdotes, my parents have thrown out all their CRT TVs and monitors because they've all failed in some way (I've personally never had any). And I'm typing this on a Dell LCD monitor from 2015 or so that still kicks ass and has great picture, even by today's standards. My 2013 MBP still has a working, good-looking screen, and it's been on the road a lot.
> Forget that, is there anything you've bought new in the last _ten_ years that you still have?
Yup, almost everything [0] still works like new, even my 2013 MBP which I've carted around a lot. It's not powerful enough anymore, so I have a new daily driver, but it still works. Hell, my gaming PC was bought circa 2013, and only had a new GPU 3 years ago (was bought for server work initially, so only had the cheapest GPU I could find). Still rocking the original SSDs, PSU, everything. Ditto for my wireless headphones I bought around 2018. The battery life is still good, the sound hasn't changed.
I've mostly lived in rental apartments, so I don't have any anecdotes about household appliances.
So not really sure what can be concluded from our anecdotes.
---
[0] The only thing that broke was an MS Sculpt keyboard, which broke down after 4 years of daily use.
My flatscreen TV and the sound bar that came with it. My daily-driver computer. My Samsung Galaxy S3 which I still use daily for some tasks, works fine. My washing machine. My Kenwood stand mixer.
All around 10 years, all working fine still without repairs.
That's just the things I could think of on the spot. There's very few things I've had to replace that were broken. Most things I've replaced because I wanted newer features, and have sold or given away the old item.
I'll concede that my previous lawn mower falls in your category. It had a plastic bushing on the main shaft, which got torn up over time, and destroyed some other parts when it held a retirement party.
An example of this is my mother’s cooker. She has had it for 15 years now and it is still going strong/only cost £300 when bought new.
The main reason for this is the simple fact I’ve gone and repaired it when something on other failed. One repair was a power box — cost me £15 and 30 minutes.
Two other repairs were heating filaments (one for the main oven, one for a job). If I remember correctly the total cost of the filaments was roughly £75.
This is one example but I can think of many others where I have repaired appliances for friends and family when their initial reaction was “it’s broke, nothing lasts now, I need to buy a new X”.
GPU
I think people buy cheap weird shit and are surprised when it breaks but if you buy simple cheap shit it tends to work until you physically break it - I expect my enameled lime hand-squeezer to last basically forever also since I don't dishwasher it.
A board game where the plastic has been made thinner and thinner over years until the game really doesn’t function now.
A game where you drop a marble in a cylinder on top of plastic rods that slot in sideways and the game is to remove the rods and whoever drops the marble loses… well these rods were so flimsy they didn’t hold the marble up.
We could get rid of it ... but it just works. Hope we're not radiating ourselves!
I couldn't imagine a modern microwave lasting even nearly that long.
I'm also running a 2005 Toyota, and a 69 Bug ... cannot imagine any modern car doing the service they've done, and reliably so.
Is... Is this a joke? My 1991 vehicle made before planned obsolescence has a few questions...
May I know the timeframe and your experience on which you base the conclusion?
Been driving for last 35 years. Every newer car is crappier in every possible way - comfort, speed, durability, quality, reliability.
It's not some subjective observations - some 40-50 years ago automakers were accomodating customers, now they accommodate numerous limitations imposed by governments to make it "safer". And I am not even touching engine limitations thanks to which we have weak motors which roar like boeing at 5k rpm but still doesn't help to move car forward.
Cars made in 70-80s easily work for 40 years, if managed properly and made by nissan, mercedes-benz, toyota and sorts. Good luck modern garbage to live slightly longer than warranty without majour issues.
You have scare quotes there for some reason, but by pretty much all accounts cars now are so much safer than before. Like to an insane amount, over a 50% reduction in chance of fatality since the 70s/80s.
> we have weak motors which roar like boeing at 5k rpm but still doesn't help to move car forward.
And again it's working. Efficiency has increased even more than safety, with new cars getting over double the fuel economy even accounting for the larger cars!
Safety cones from driver knowledge how to avoid dangerous situations and hedge risks. “Safety” comes from useless bells and whistles, which give impression of “intelligent” system.
Bot sure what you mean under efficiency - at my books efficiency is how fast i can get from point A to B with minimal expense. Low engine volume cars lose it at every point
Sport mode on some cars is so lousy implemented (some SEA market toyota for example) that it's not even a solution.
My first car was from 2004 and I've been envy of many features, especially "security" ones of modern cars like cornering lights or QoL stuff like reversing camera that I had to mount as customization.
Our modem vehicles are virtually new by comparison with only oil changes and replacement of wear items. The leather seats have some wrinkles and the floor carpeting looks worn.
While I generally agree with you, that data isn’t very conclusive.
JD powers also need to be read carefully to not put all problems in the same basket. Malfunctioning engine vs “Bluetooth pairing was laggy with my 8 year old android phone” can be counted in same basket if you don’t look carefully.
This brings us to the next thing which is that both expectation and complexity on todays cars are thousand times higher than 20 years ago, both from customers and emission agencies. Given that, it’s amazing how well they still work. Often better than older models.
This puts cars in its own exceptional category that is much more difficult to compare. Where’s a freakin juicer, a ballpoint pen or a pair of gloves has no additional expectations today compared to 1940. They just got worse.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw-zCsybNtg
- I click the link; it's a press release from JD Power which I thought is pretty well known to be a corrupted institution that more or less just sells off awards to whichever manufacturers want to pay the most for them. Oh well, let's give it the benefit of the doubt and read the actual study which surely has data to back their assumptions.
- The study isn't actually linked anywhere for me to review
- There's a link to " learn more" about the study. I click it, and it's another press release about the study. It has a download button at the top, surely this must be for downloading the study. I click it, and it's a 1 page PDF of the press release with no actual details.
- At this point I can click a link to go back to the original press release but nothing to actually read the dang study.
All checks out I guess, modern cars are more reliable!
Even if I did actually find the full "study" I can absolutely guess that it's entirely based on trash data like random surveys of consumers and would be near worthless without having a single real data point around how often cars/parts break down.
https://www.readingeagle.com/2020/02/12/all-your-favorite-br...
Hand grinders are getting better and better too, so if longevity is a concern you’re in luck.
As to your Encore, if you feel like a cheap upgrade you could replace your cone burr with the M2 from the slightly more expensive Virtuoso model. It's a drop-in replacement, however, you will have to take your grinder apart.
My grandfather (1922-2006) opined: "Some folks say things aren't made like they used to be. But I remember those junky old cars that would break down every 50 or 100 miles. I remember that unreliable crap. I'd far rather have a modern car, even if I can't fix it." (He was more of a carpenter than an auto mechanic, built much of his own house)
Those are all things that are still in cars (or have been replaced with digital equivalents) but have become so reliable that we need to be reminded to check them. It’s not unreasonable to expect spark plugs to last 100k miles.
But yes, along the way were regular hassles with engine timing and carburetor adjustments. You could DIY if you invested in a timing light and you knew what you were doing, but you could also just take it to a garage, back when indie garages could still regularly undercut ripoff dealerships.
Also, btw, Tom and Ray did always always always point out that repairing was cheaper than replacing. Most repairs are pennies. (thousands and thousands of pennies)
Then I got to the point where I knew I was old... kicking the tires on the mini-van saying "shes a 'beaut"
But name a single other car anything talkshow that you can even name or even recall vaguely even if you cant recall what it was named?
So - like mycelium, ideas spread much further that you think they may have before the internet.
(so did STDs, if you catch my...)
(If you ever listened to Car Talk - you can hear it)
My 2003 Mustang V6 manual was a complete moneypit. The electrical system went in the first year, despite me taking it regularly for maintenance. There was no traction control and it used more gas for less power than my current minivan.
My parents' 94 Taurus rusted easily and their 02 oldsmobile alero was a pure shitbox that was uncomfortable to drive and was in the shop all the time.
My 2016 Sienna and 2019 Model 3 are, by all means, better cars. (I was using the train in the meantime, much less stress than driving was) I have had zero issues (outside changing to winter tires)
Yup. Even into the 70s, "Made in Japan" was a putdown. That's just about when Japanese hi-fi equipment led the charge by quality products, soon followed by automobiles.
I'm old enough to remember that, and from what I recall, the objections of people I knew to buying Japanese cars were not that they were junk, they were that in some of the places I lived growing up, working at an automobile assembly plant was the best occupational outcome that a large part of the population could realistically aspire to. If those jobs disappear, then what?
That was back when the Democrats were against free trade. That all changed, their argument being that trade would make us, in aggregate, better off, and if certain parts of the population were harmed by free trade, we could use the gains of the people that benefited from trade to compensate those who were harmed.
That all happened except for the compensate those who were harmed part.
Yes, I remember.
It's a bit of a meme to now make conversions about bullet holes in airplane wings. Instead, here's Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
These days it feels like you need to do extensive research to make sure you are not buying something that is total crap. Amazon is literally flooded with totally random brand named (all weirdly uppercase? EEVYUI, XAATYE, WURIHT etc) trash which 9 times out of 10 (at least) will be awful shite. I have found myself going back to "traditional retailers" for a lot of things now as I cannot trust a lot of things I order online not to be the absolute cheapest possible shite ever produced. And it's not like they are priced cheaply either - example recently was a specific light bulb I needed - Osram and Philips had models on Amazon for approx £9 which I would vaguely trust, but they were hidden in a sea of made-up brands asking £7 to £8 which you know will fail within a month or two.
That said, I don't fully agree with the sentiment. With a little research and accepting that quality costs and so not buying the cheapest/second-cheapeat models we have appliances/things that have lasted many years - washing machines, dishwashers, coffee grinders, fridges, cars etc. Some of these we have replaced for other reasons like changing needs or wanting new features (e.g. we needed a dishwasher that dried plastic things since kids stuff is all plastic - the old machine was perfectly fine when we got rid of it and yea, no one wanted it).
It is somewhat galling to think "wow why am I paying £600 for a dishwasher when I can get one for £250!?" but then £600 only seems expensive because of the crappy £250 one that will only last a month or two past the 12 month warranty.
Everything I haven’t lost mostly lasts. Don’t know what to tell you. Even like 55” TV I bought in 2014 for like $500. Life’s pretty good.
Really the only thing that will fix it is stronger warranty law, this will make things more expensive, but it will massively cut down on landfill fodder.
A refrigerator that can’t last 20 years is terrible for the environment to throw away when it lasts 3-6 like many Samsung and LG fridges do…
I will keep repairing my ancient Sears washer and dryer for as long as possible.
Modern fridges are much more energy efficient, which makes this calculus somewhat complicated.
Apple have also been forced to replace MacBooks under warranty as far as 4 years out, from my anecdotal experience, and even have pages addressing expectations: https://www.apple.com/au/legal/statutory-warranty/au/
The money quote from the above link:
> For the avoidance of doubt, Apple acknowledges that the Australian Consumer Law may provide for remedies beyond 24 months for a number of its products.
It’s worth noting that the Australian consumer law states that goods must be of “acceptable quality”, or “merchantable quality”, specifically related to advertised quality and price: essentially if you are sold something more expensive for more money, it has more warranty.
Another angle to view this from is that saving money is jot worthwhile. People who get paid in dollars need to spend them quickly, so on offer around them is a plethora of goods and services that they can spend it on. Nobody saves for stuff so that stuff better be cheap, I'm sure the ideal price for an item is some function of the median weekly paycheck and apartment rent.
Viewed from yet another angle (and IMO a more informative one if you want to get at what exactly is going on here objectively) you see that inflation has a general corrosive effect on value and quality. The velocity of money increases, and the value of holding money decreases the longer it is held. So businesses trying to maximize profit have to go from getting people to spend their money to getting their money first. They have to have fast turnaround time for that capital. They have to pump out as many units as they can as fast as they can, those units have to degrade quicker than the money loses value or they can't make a profit. This creates a culture of unscrupulousness, the phenomenon compounds and speeds up over a few generations. Inflation hollows out and cheapens everything, including the culture of your society.
Doesn't have a touch screen, and there is no app to tell me what food to order, but it just keeps on running and doing what it is supposed to do. Not sure any amount of money could buy a new model that would last this long.
and before anyone says newer models are more energy efficient so I should replace it, you have to factor in the wastefulness of having thrown away 8-12 refrigerators over that 70 year time period and the impact that would have had on the environment.
New things don't last forever, but they also don't normally need to last forever. You can't universally say the modern incarnation of something is the end-all-be-all. Generally, products are enhanced over time (modulo the enshitifcation factor), and this means people want to upgrade after certain periods of time. Making things cost more so they last longer than most peoples' desired lifespan for an object is a waste of money.
All that being said, it's never been easier to put junk out there on the market. The rise of online shopping has greatly reduced the role of "buyers" in the market. Without an experienced taste maker vouching for the quality of an item, it's very easy to end up buying shit.
First of all: survivorship bias. All of the old appliances that still work are only the ones which still work. This goes for the author's juicer.
Second: things which have investment attention now are excellent quality and things which are waning towards the end of their lifecycle are having the last few corners cut before the Private Equity firm that now owns them throws in the towel, throughly wrung dry. Author's examples: staples - the age of paper documents is over. matches - the Bic lighter is a modern marvel. plastic grocery bags - banned in more places every year. pens - same as staples.
But now, turn your eye to products being actively invested in now? Some may be at their peak this very moment.
And if you want something quality, go spend for it. I've got an industrial stapler like you wouldn't believe, 50 sheets of paper easy.
If the embodied environmental impact of a product increases 10% to make it last 100% longer then we need to think about making that change rather than producing twice as many to replace the broken ones.
If you're a person who loses pens or holds onto them so long the ink dries up, it'd be better to waste an object made as cheaply as possible than one made to last.
This is a balance to play as well.
The easiest way to clean it up significantly is to better tax industry such that energy, resource usage, and transportation are all represented in the price such that the economy actually reflects the environmental impact of production rather than just the business costs of the moment.
I focused in on pens as I was reading the piece because I'm something of a pen snob, something I realized when I was at a job fair one day in college and I had a brief feeling of aversion when a recruiter offered me a shitty free pen.
It's not hard to get good pens, and they're not particularly expensive. $1-2/pen will get you very solid ball-point pens that write smoothly and reliably. Some of them can be refilled to save more money and reduce waste. There are wide varieties of styles, color, and point fineness to choose from.
If you usually buy shitty pens for $0.10 each or whatever that may seem like a lot, but unless you go through multiple pens a day or something it's really not. The $10/year or so I spend on slightly nicer pens is well worth it to me.
I suspect there are probably also similar quality options available for things like staples and matches, but I'm not familiar with those.
I buy a few packs of my favorite uniball pens every year and sprinkle them around the house and in all my bags. Very happy with them.
Many people (especially baby boomers) learned a shortcut, by using brand name as a proxy for quality of goods. The problem with this is that all those brands eventually outsourced and sold themselves and cashed in on the old brand quality association. Cheapening and cheapening as the producers realized that people still bought their product no matter what the quality was. Also, people equate flair and style of product with the quality, because they aren't actually good judges of quality. You can find many cheap junk products today that retain a poor skeuomorphic shadow of their former glory. At some point consumers learned "well if it has the shiny chrome it's a good one" and producers learned they could add a chunk of shiny plastic and people would prefer their product.
Brand names are worthless now, for the most part, and if you're not good at judging quality yourself, it can be a difficult consumer landscape to navigate.
If not, do you realize that you claiming " If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died." When "these" refers exclusively to those who haven't died is the very definition of survivorship bias?
In my opinion, any device whose manufacture requires an amount of resources approaching "large appliance" levels should be required to have a 10-year parts and labor warranty. I don't care if that makes them cost more. I hope it makes them cost more. It's insane the way it is.
It's not (or at least, mostly not) survivorship bias. We aren't only talking about "Walk around a thrift store or grandma's house and grab a handful of appliances" because yup, they'll all still be working. But we can also ask our parents (or if we're over 30 ask ourselves) how many washers or dryers or mixers or blenders or televisions or whatever were required to be replaced after 6-48 months due to them spontaneously dying irreparably. Many such things did end up in the landfill then -- but mainly because people were eager to trade up to new shiny ones with better performance or features because consumer goods were improving every year back then.
(Compared to now when the main "advancements" happening to most household goods, if any, is the replacement of buttons with touchscreens and unreplaceable circuit boards, adding a wi-fi module and companion "App," and addition of subscription services.)
So let's take all the things that I had in the 90s that I had to replace because they broke:
- ...
You can say I'm only remembering the positives, honestly, I can not think of a single thing I _had_ to replace. I remember buying new things, but it was always because I wanted the new-shiny, not because I had to.
Survivorship bias isn't "only being able to remember the positives", it's _concentrating_ on the positives and neglecting to take into account the negatives.
https://xkcd.com/1994
In reality I need to consider the cost of my time. It’s much cheaper to buy new, already keyed CAT-6 cables than to split and order a raw cable end myself into an RJ45 jacket.
If reducing waste is more important to you than time, then yes by all means try to repair things. But remember everyone has different priorities.
That way there is no waste. The appliance will get fixed and resold. It also allows people to specialize their skills to repair things more optimally.
My brother works at a co that makes custom repair parts for these machines he sees them all the time. They often have to fly people out to the factory to do measurements and calibrations because no documentation exists.
(Its sadly not a small mom and pop shop its one of the biggest mfg part corps in the worls. If you hoped it was some mom and pop shop that keeps these running.)
I don't see how that could work: the population is far larger than it was then, so our consumption of those must be up a lot. How could a stock of machines that was suitable then could be producing even half the volume consumed now?
I imagine one of the differences is that they run 24x7x365 without any downtime unless it breaks (they never do maintenance only break/fix). These machines were super overbuilt so maybe they were never used at peak capacity back then either? Maybe there were improvements over the years? I assume the getting raw materials to the factory is much more efficient now days allowing more production then they used to be able to have?
Look how many things ran out during the pandemic. Maybe we are over capacity at many of these places already? How often do any of us head out to the middle of nowhere to check the stock levels of product regularly?
If you were able to check and report back, I would be very interested!
- 2017 MacBook Pro and iPhone SE
- honestly, the Dre beats that came with above MacBook
- every Lexus sedan ever, hybrid or not
- Tumi backpack and carryon
- Sonos soundbar
- M Audio 88 key midi controller keyboard (survived 7 moves)
It sounds like the author’s problems largely center around things with motors and pumps, which tbh doesn’t surprise me. The high-end brand I’ve been most disappointed with in that regard has been Dyson. Been through about 4 of their full size and hand vacs.. so many random issues. Really not worth it.
How long do you keep your cars? These are machines that can last a few decades on lower end models as long as you go for durability over fanciness, and provide the nominal amount of maintenance
I live in a major metro area. It seems like for anything I could possibly want, there is a shop that sells it at whatever quality level I desire. And repairs... People are always saying that you can't fix anything. But that's not true. Just last year my oven stopped working; the local repairman sent the circuit board to a place nearby that "rebuilt" it (checked every component, desoldered and replaced anything that wasn't perfect).
Yep, houses are expensive in the big city. Taxes are crazy in the big city. But the economy supports having durable stuff. If your only option is Target and Amazon, I can understand feeling like nothing you buy works.
Oh, and don't get me started about pens. Come on. A Pilot Metropolitan and a bottle of ink that will last 5-10 years will set you back a whole $40. And then you only need to buy more ink.
My workshop tools, however, don't seem to be affected. My soldering iron? Absolute tank. Milwaukee drill bits? I abuse them, and they don't care. Even the mid-grade Craftsman multimeter is totally competent.
There are practically no entries occupying the middle of the market that are on the basic end regarding features & frills but also high-quality.
It’s incredibly annoying. I can either get an absolute trash sofa for less than $1,000 or I can get a high-end, high-quality one for $5000+. Now there are definitely sofas that occupy the price range between those, but they’re almost all just wildly overpriced garbage that’s no better than the sub-$1000 junk. The same goes for dining tables, cabinetry, window treatments, cooking appliances, etc. I end up just scouring for “vintage” stuff that’s in decent shape whenever possible. It’s like I have this whole other full-time job trying to find quality used goods because the only things I can just get new immediately are garbage.
When I bought my couch in late 2019 it was also delivered within a couple of weeks.
Are you custom ordering something? I believe that common configurations ship immediately, but any kind of customization requires that multiple-month lead time.
It's really hard to find anything non-antique that uses better materials or craftsmanship. They do exist and I own a few pieces but the prices for such things will make you blush. There's no middle anymore where you forgo labor intensive details like hand-carved detailing, complex bends and shapes, hand stitching, embroidered patterns, or fancy internal mechanisms but keep the "can still last generations" build quality for somewhat reasonable prices.
From the page:
* $3500 (I believe I paid $3000 in 2019)
* Frames are benchmade with hardwood that's kiln-dried to prevent warping
* Hardwood legs
* Polyfoam seat cushions wrapped in fiber-down blend and encased in downproof ticking (is this "bad"? I think they're plenty comfortably and haven't shown any significant wear in the past four years)
Their leather version is $5000, so maybe the claim that good leather couches start at around $5000 has more truth: https://www.crateandbarrel.com/axis-leather-2-piece-sectiona...
So this tells me that the price for a sofa (that is made domestically and not slapped together from particle board, a half inch of foam, and about 4 springs) has gone up by 25-30%. And I think you're saying that therefore, this isn't an utterly crazy price hike. I'd agree it's modest.
Thing is, I think what's changed is demographics. In 1990, a LOT of people bought furniture at a department store or furniture store. They could afford it, but also here's the interesting part: It was much more rare then to find a $250 sofa. If that was your budget, you just bought a used good sofa and you probably got a better product. When super cheap everything appeared in the late 90s, it drove out the good manufactured goods, and many of the stores that sold those good items. People felt like buying the quality of things they used to buy would be extravagant, since they could buy an IKEA or Walmart version for less than half, and also, many families started to be worse off financially than their parents' generation had been, adding to their feelings of frugality. Unfortunately, this crap is so shoddy in most cases that it's actually more expensive when you factor in its lifetime.
[1] https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1990-JCP...
* Some present-day comparisons:
- https://www.jcpenney.com/p/signature-design-by-ashley-camila...
- https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/paerup-sofa-gunnared-beige-s293...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
I wouldn't even consider a piece of used upholstered furniture today, regardless of price or product quality.
That used sofa today represents a large risk to my wallet, property and health that it mostly didn't in the peak pesticide era.
Poor people are aware of the same - and if possible they too will opt for the shit-tier couch they can afford vs running that risk with a nice used one that would have been valued the same 30 years ago.
I don't mean to detract from your point with this - I've had a few things here and there from them, I agree they sell quality stuff.
I've been noticing the same thing. But I also suspect that many people pay a little more for stuff, expecting that to make it better. The number of brands and variety of prices one can find on-line is astounding, and it must be much larger than the number of factories in Asia actually making the stuff.
I bought a small dining table and 4 chairs from a nearby store that specializes in Scandinavian furniture. I ended up mixing and matching 2 pairs of chairs because I liked the contrast of 2 different styles at different sides of the table. Anyhow, fast forward about 15 years and 4 house moves and the table and 2 of the chairs are rock solid. The other 2 chairs are wobbly junk that I've repeatedly tried to fix but am about to give up on. The table and 2 good chairs were made in Denmark, the 2 shit chairs were made in Malaysia and are just "Scandinavian style" I guess. So yeah, decent stuff is still out there, but perhaps it's harder than ever to parse the marketplace and figure out which items are the high-quality ones. Even if you go to a store with lots of quality stuff, they might have some junk mixed in as they try to expand their market.
Moving overseas I had to buy a new sofa in 2021. Middle of COVID, Ikea didn't have any I couldn't wait. The sofa I ended up with is the cheapest shit sofa I've ever owned. The materials are clearly inferior. No part of it is cleanable. The cushions are one sided so can not flip them in 4 directions, they only fit one way. I got tired of looking and settled on these though, expecting to replace them.
Anyway, my point was (a) I understand your POV but also (b) there are possibly some good under $1000 sofas. I've had similar luck with a few Ikea dining room tables that were solid wood, not particle board.
Worst luggage I ever owned was Rimowa. It was the most expensive I've bought and broke several times. They'd fix it, but who wants to spend their vacation taking their luggage to the repair shop (and lugging it full from the airport to the hotel while it's broke)
Worst and most expensive jacket I ever bought, Paul Smith, got a hole in the main pocket within 30 days and the hanging hook in the collar broke in 2 weeks.
Worst jeans I ever bought, Diesel. Ripped in 1 month.
Isn't that supposed to be a feature on that brand?
When buying clothing, it's worthwhile to spend a little bit of time learning what makes quality clothing and what doesn't. That's very helpful in avoiding over-branded garbage being sold for far more than it cost to make in a sweatshop.
Our current dining room table is from Ikea. 100% birch. It'll outlast us all, it cost about 30% of a similar boutique one. The chairs are plastic/wood composite from Ikea, cheap AF but still fit perfectly with the table.
The same goes for bicycles. Except that the "junk" are mostly functional (if not durable) and might be less attractive to thieves.
The options are: Ikea Cardboard (my current choice), or design/looks first boutique stuff that's not meant to hold anything except a TV (no holes for wiring etc - things that the Ikea one has...)
Currently I'm looking at local carpenters, it's gonna be about the same for a fully custom built hardwood unit vs the boutique choice.
It's exhausting. But after spending a month or two studying, you will be able to find pieces constructed to last a lifetime.
For sofas try the Insider's Guide to Furniture. Plenty of brands in the middle range using hardwood construction, made in the USA, with high density foam.
We purchased a $3200 couch that is definitely mid-tier for its size and it's been a fantastic value so far.
Was able to select very durable fabric too
Guess they're >$3k now, but still well under $5k
The gist I remember is that people lock onto a single differentiator: normally cost or quality. This moves most of producers to those outside points. Companies ‘trying’ to stay in the middle end up being more expensive (on a cost/quality measure) because they can’t reach mass production as easily as either the cheap or fancy.
I purchased a Capresso Infinity Conical Burr Grinder from Amazon.com on Aug 21, 2020 for $157.94 and have used it, at a minimum, once per day every day I have woken up at home for three years (at least 1,000 times) and it shows no signs of slowing down.
If my definition of "a lot" correct and is "greater than three" then the author might want to have his or her wiring checked.
Also, as far as staples go, premium staples that can fasten (practically) paper to sheet metal are $0.20 more per 1,000-count than garbage staples. Buy the premium staples that come in a plastic box with a hinged lid instead of the cardboard bricks of staples and you'll never have a jam again.
> The two or three new pens I use each week that, because no ink comes out of them
Ok this is just ridiculous.
TWO TO THREE. PENS. PER WEEK. This has moved into the realm of satire.
Buy Pilot G2 pens. Problem solved. They'll still write after going through the wash.
Where is this person getting their pens?
What are they doing to their pens?
What is going on?
Am I high?
That being said I have nearly no problems with the quality of any purchases I've made because I pay, at a minimum, the inflation adjusted equivalent of what I would have paid 20 years ago for the same product. I also research everything obsessively. Like, read the manual and watch YouTube teardowns of microwaves before buying a new microwave obsessively. I have many fewer things than most Americans but all of my shit is the nicest it can possibly be within my budget.
The race to the bottom is a race I do not participate in.
The bottom is where the junk is.
> Weak-link computer chips in items that don’t require them also came in for abuse.
Indeed.
I cannot recommend his podcast with Matt Taibbi [1] or the print-only newspaper he edits-at-large [2] highly enough. The man is an American treasure.
[1] https://www.racket.news/s/america-this-week
[2] https://www.countyhighway.com/
"The reduction in the purchasing power of money is similar to a form of taxation... As people start spending more and saving less, they become more present oriented in all their decision making... this helps explain why civilizations prosper under a sound monetary system, but disintegrate when their monetary systems are debased."
Cheap money cheapens everything, because the velocity of money is high and so capital turnover is the name of the game. To make a profit, what you sell has to be cheaper than the money you get. It cheapens people because they have to constantly be scratching for a buck just to keep up.